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Title: UNH Scientist Helps Show Collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelf is “Unprecedented” ENVIRONMENTAL ALERT**
Source:
UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
URL Source: http://www.unh.edu/news/news_releases/2005/august/ds_050802ice.html
Published: Aug 3, 2005
Author: David Sims, UNH Science dept.
Post Date: 2005-08-14 12:09:24 by siagiah
Keywords: “Unprecedented”, ENVIRONMENTAL, Scientist
Views: 648
Comments: 57
UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space UNH Scientist Helps Show Collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelf is “Unprecedented” Contact: David Sims mailto:david.sims@unh.edu 603-862-5369 Science Writer Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space Aug. 3, 2005 DURHAM, N.H. -- A paper to be published in the August 4 issue of the journal Nature asserts that the recent collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea of Antarctica is “unprecedented” in recent times. The ice shelf – the third largest in the Antarctic – has undergone catastrophic decay in recent years. A total of about 3, 250 square kilometers of the shelf area disintegrated in a five-day period in the winter of 2002. Over the last five years the ice mass has lost some 5,700 square kilometers and is currently 40 percent the size it was previously when stable. Using marine sediment cores from the ocean floor formerly covered by the ice shelf, scientists found no evidence for “episodes of open marine conditions” indicating that the ice shelf has been in existence for last 8,000 years – a period of time referred to as the Holocene Epoch. “Our unique observation, that for the first time the Larsen B is involved in collapse, indicates that the current warming trend in the NW Weddell Sea has exceeded past warm episodes in its magnitude,” states the paper, whose lead author is Eugene Domack of Hamilton College. University of New Hampshire scientist Michael Prentice, one of the article’s authors, is an expert in the paleoceanographic technique used to extract past ocean properties from the seafloor sediment. The technique involves analyzing the chemical composition of the remains of tiny, one-celled animals called Foraminifera or “forams.” The technique, according to Prentice, is technically challenging in polar regions but highly accurate at giving a clear picture of past water temperatures and salinity levels. Says Prentice, “Some of the forams in the cores lived and died in the surface water adjacent to the ice shelf before settling to the seafloor to be incorporated into the sediment that we recovered. A pristine record of ocean surface water can be had from analyzing them.” Prentice calls forams the “workhorse” in the field of paleoclimatology. The method involves dissolving the carbonate shells of the tiny forams and, using a mass spectrometer, measuring the oxygen isotopes contained within the carbon dioxide gas that comes from the shells. Because the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the shells is controlled by the water conditions at the time the forams were living, forams from layers of accumulating sediment give a clear record of water conditions from the present back deep into the past. “We got a pretty good fix on what the longer history of ice shelf extent and melting has been,” Prentice says. This fix, in turn, gives scientists a context for judging the significance of the current collapse. Prentice adds, “These data are the first good isotopic record adjacent to a crumbling ice shelf.” And that isotope record, he says, suggests that there has been a progressive slow melting/thinning of the ice shelf over the last 8,000 years. “This is due in part to climate warming. But melting over the last 8,000 years was never close to what it is today, and so the current collapse and glacier surge that it has unleashed are unprecedented.” He adds, “The Larsen B is considered a harbinger for the massive ice shelves to its south, which, for now, dam the large majority of the world’s ice. “ UNH credentials: related links: http://www.eos.sr.unh.edu/ The Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a multidisciplinary scientific research institute dedicated to understanding the integrated behavior of the Earth and its surrounding universe. Established in 1985, the Institute has become a world leader in the fields of space science, terrestrial ecosystems, oceanography, atmospheric science and global climate change. About the Institute . . . UNH is a "high-impact university" (in the company of Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton). The Institute for Scientific Information ranks UNH third in geoscience research citations and fourth in environmental science citations. EOS is the University of New Hampshire's largest research enterprise, receiving more than $30 million each year in external research support. UNH is a world leader in Gamma-Ray telescopes. EOS was the American center for development of the Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, one of NASA's "great observatories." UNH Receives $38 Million From NASA for Sun-Earth Mission http://www.eos.sr.unh.edu/About/News/Articles?NEWS_ID=454 DURHAM, N.H. – The University of New Hampshire has received the largest, single research award in the history of the institution – $38 million from NASA to build instruments for the space agency’s Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission. As part of an international team from 12 institutes, space scientists at UNH’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) will construct instruments for MMS’ four identical solar-terrestrial probes, which will study little understood, fundamental processes in the Earth’s magnetosphere -- the magnetic shield that protects the Earth from solar and cosmic radiation. Over the next eight years, UNH scientists, engineers, graduate and undergraduate students will help construct two Electron Drift Instruments, (EDI) for each of the four spacecraft. EDI is designed to measure electric fields and electron drifts using a controlled beam of electrons. In addition, UNH will construct the central electronic controls for all the instruments being built to measure the spectrum of electromagnetic fields around the spacecraft. This “FIELDS” instrument suite will be comprised of six sensors per spacecraft. “The expertise of the UNH Space Science Center in space instrumentation was critical to forming our excellent international FIELDS team on MMS, which will contribute many of the new observations for this exciting mission,” says physics professor Roy Torbert, director of the EOS Space Science Center and UNH’s principal investigator for the mission. James L. Burch of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, is leading construction of the mission’s $140 million instrument suite. The MMS spacecraft are slated to launch aboard an 86-foot, 225,000-pound Delta II rocket in July 2013. The mission is designed to explore the plasma processes that govern the interaction of the Earth’s magnetic field with the highly charged solar wind. Plasma is a highly ionized gas sometimes described as the “fourth state of matter.” Plasmas occupy 99 percent of the observable universe. However, only in the Earth’s magnetosphere – a multilayered, comet-shaped magnetic shield that, in its tail, extends as far as 60,000 kilometers away – are these important plasma processes readily accessible for sustained study through in situ measurements. One of those processes is magnetic reconnection, in which magnetic fields reconfigure themselves and release energy. Reconnection, a main focus of the MMS mission, is the basic mechanism by which energy from the sun and the solar wind is transferred into the Earth’s magnetospheric system. Reconnection is widely believed to play a crucial role in space and astrophysical phenomena such as magnetospheric substorms and solar flares. It is a crucial process to understand in order to be able to predict “space weather” conditions. For example, a blast of this energy from substorms or solar flares can affect satellites, Earth-based instruments and power grids, shower astronauts and aircraft flying over the Earth’s poles with deadly radiation, and light up the sky with aurora. “In a sense, MMS represents a culmination of the extensive work done in space science at the university,” Torbert says. “It is based on previous successful NASA and European Space Agency missions in which UNH has participated, such as the CLUSTER, SOHO, ACE, WIND, and POLAR satellites, as well as our theoretical and numerical simulation work, where the process of reconnection has been observed and simulated, but never studied as rigorously as will be done on MMS.” Other plasma processes that MMS will study include charged particle acceleration, and turbulence in key boundary regions of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Along with magnetic reconnection, these processes control the flow of energy, mass, and momentum within and across plasma boundaries, occur throughout the universe, and are fundamental to our understanding of astrophysical and solar system plasmas. Despite four decades of study, beginning with the early Sputnik and Explorer spacecraft, much about the operation of these processes remains unknown or poorly understood. MMS and its multiple spacecraft approach will provide a much more detailed picture of the region. Each of the four satellites, flying together as a tightly coordinated fleet through the magnetosphere, will carry identical instruments and will thus be able to gather a multi-dimensional view of these processes that have eluded previous studies. Along with UNH, co-investigators include the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the French Center for Terrestrial and Planetary Environments, the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Braunschweig, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the University of Iowa. Scientists Gather at UNH to Discuss Initial Findings From Massive 2004 Air Quality Study DURHAM, N.H. -- Last year at this time, seacoast New Hampshire was the hub of an unprecedented atmospheric science field campaign involving hundreds of scientists from around the world. Beginning Tuesday, August 9 at the University of New Hampshire, preliminary data from the International Consortium for Atmospheric Research on Transport and Transformation (ICARTT) will be shared for the first time since the six-week-long field experiment drew to a close in mid-August 2004. “This was a really complex experiment, with so many people and so much logistical integration that it took a year for people to pull their data together,” says UNH atmospheric chemist Robert Talbot, director of AIRMAP– a joint National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/UNH program aimed at understanding climate variability and the source of persistent air pollutants in New England. AIRMAP’s four regional state-of-the-art atmospheric observatories served as the foundation for the field experiment. U.S. Senator Judd Gregg helped secure funding for the AIRMAP program and facilitated NOAA's role in ICARTT. Adds Talbot, “This campaign was the first time we’ve been able to make a concerted effort, using airplanes, a ship, satellites, and balloons, to better understand regional air quality, intercontinental transport of polluted air masses, the role that nighttime chemistry plays, and the effects of pollutants on atmospheric cooling and warming. So, there should be some important information coming out of this meeting.” For example, there will be insights into the possible role that sea-borne compounds called halogens, like chlorine or iodine, play in creating or destroying ground-based ozone levels. When polluted continental air meets up with halogen-rich coastal marine air, the chemistry gets complicated and is not well understood. A better understanding is important if scientists are to calculate the global ozone budget much like they are trying to ascertain the world’s carbon budget vis-à-vis climate change and global warming. Tropospheric ozone (as opposed to the stratospheric variety that helps protect the Earth from ultraviolet radiation) is generally considered to be a pollutant and can cause respiratory problems and damage plants. At the same time, this ozone plays a dual role in helping to cleanse the Earth’s atmosphere, and so keeping a healthy balance of the compound is important in the overall, global state of our atmosphere. At the workshop, ICARTT scientists will also for the first time be able to compare notes on what was discovered about the effect aerosols or particulate matter have on the cooling or warming of air masses. The “radiative” properties of these particles play a critical role in regional and hemispheric temperatures. Additional insights, based on what was observed last summer, will be provided into how well current forecast models are able to simulate the chemistry and transport of pollutants. Talbot notes also that, like the university’s prominent role in ICARTT itself, UNH’s hosting of this meeting is a feather in its cap because scientific gatherings of this size and importance are generally reserved for special sessions of the American Geophysical Union meetings or the like. This will be the first meeting of some of the finest minds in atmospheric chemistry well before next fall’s AGU meeting in San Francisco. And, says Talbot, “Until you hear what everybody’s found it’s really hard to develop any answers, until you can see how the whole thing fits together it’s hard to pull out the real simplified gems.” Editors: The ICARTT meeting will be held in the Granite State Room of the Memorial Union Building on the Durham campus beginning Tuesday, August 9, and running through Friday morning on August 12. Scientists will be available for reporter’s questions Wednesday and Thursday. There will be nearly 100 posters graphically displaying the ICARTT data. By David Sims Science Writer Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (603) 862-5369 david.sims@unh.edu Sia's comments: UNH's science department is not a "lightweight" source. We'd do well to HEED the alerts our nation's scientists are sending us about what we are doing to the environment with our pollution. Our air quality, our water safety, and our very LIVES can depend on it. If the Artic shelf melts down, we are SCREWED whether we realize it or not. The flood of fresh water into the salty oceans will kill billions of sea creatures essential to Earth's ecology... nevermind flooding our land masses, warming the globe even MORE, and most likely, triggering an ice age. All these things are NORMAL occurences to happen to the earth and all have happened before but NOT due to human pollution and not over a period of 150 years of "triggers" due to POLLUTION. We won't LIKE Mother nature if we don't start listening.
http://www.eos.sr.unh.edu/About/News/Articles?NEWS_ID=476
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 46.
#2. To: siagiah (#0)
What if GM shells out money for a partisan think tank to hire a couple of unemployable professors to generate a report saying this isn't true? Rush could then spew the results on the radio to the bots could repeat them on FR and LP. Wouldn't this make the problem go away?
Yes it would, we would be safe then. All I know is I hope they hurry up with their kangaroo think tank so I can breath a sigh of relief.
Google the three New Yorker articles on this. They came out about last April. They do a really good job of showing what data is available and how it was obtained. They have a really good record of the percent CO2 from ice cores. It goes back about ten thousand years. The articles explain how the mean temperature was obtained for about the past two thousand years. The CO2 level and average mean temperature track almost 100%. You can see the start of the industrial age very clearly. A place where I used to work had a great graph of CO2 levels and temperature for about the past 1000 years. One thing I saw was that the average mean temperature reached a peak in about 1929, when the dust bowel hit. The temperature then came back down for WW I and WW II. It started ramping back up at the end of WW II. It hit the level of the 1929 peak again a couple of years ago. This is when the bad droughts again started up in the west. I don't know if the rise in mean temperature was the cause, but the droughts began as soon as the temperature hit the old 1929 level.
Are you talking about continental U.S. or the Northern hemisphere? It's not true for worldwide temperature as this graph shows:
No, that wouldn't show it. They are using some diffence function to inject noise into the graph. It looks like something from Limbaugh's site. What you need is a straight plot of the actual average mean temperature. You will probably have to pull this from an actual scientific site.
LOL, like I would ever go there! My chart came from a college class site: http://www.elmhurst.edu/~chm/vchembook/globalwarmA.html and they say how they got the chart: o Data was collected from land based stations, from ocean buoys, and from ships. o For each year data has been averaged to come up with a yearly average. o Data is smoothed to accommodate historical changes that skew the data (e.g., weather stations near cities record artificially high temperatures because create what is called an "urban heat island effect.").
You do realize that the geological record shows, among other things, that there was once a time where there were no ice caps at all, and that this was long before the first human lit the first campfire. And no, the oceans didn't cover the entire earth like "Waterworld". Look, the reason we're being pummeled with all of this doom nonsense is to soften us up so that we'll accept whatever tax/fee/punishment the globalists decide to impose on the First World in order to drag their living standards down to the Third World. You can bet that every single word in these global warming stories being pushed in the mass media have been carefully crafted and focus group reviewed for maximum emotional manipulation power. They'll use every soft term and weak allegory in the book, and throw in stories of puppies drowning from rising ocean levels. They'll push and they'll push and they'll push until they get whatever big tax break/spending package/new tax they want, and we'll get the bill. You see, it's the glorious new age of public/private partnerships. The private sector gets the profits, and the public gets the bill. This "global warming" thing is just one more sick scam designed by corporate elites to screw the rest of us. That's why the media is pushing it so hard. You think the megacorporations that own the media give two rat butts about "the environment"? If you do, I've got a bridge to sell you....
If you read some of the serious stuff on this, I think you'll see that nobody thinks we can suddenly get conservation conscious and stop it. We are now past the point of no return. We need to be sensible to keep the process for accerating, but most of the concern is about trying to figure out what is going to happen and what we are going to do about it. Some huge droughts and some very violent weather is expected. Also serious flooding in other areas. Good crop growing regions may dry up in the next thirty years and formerly arid regions my become very wet.
Exactly!!! If we don't listen up to what mother EARTH is telling us, the world as we know it will change in the not too distant future... Most likely, NOT FOR THE BETTER from our POV. We have time NOW to study and plan for what might happen; to avoid making it all worse; and to HOPEFULLY put into effect plans and ideas for how to PREVENT some of the potential changes. Those who refuse to heed the smell of smoke while they can still escape, will die in the fire that rages around them later. Let's not forget that a few short months ago there were those who INSISTED and who BELIEVED that the paid whores telling Terri Shiavo's parents that she wasn't brain dead were right. Our feckless misLEADER was amongst them... An indisputable autopsy PROVES them all wholly wrong (no surprise, the medical world told them EIGHT YEARS AGO). There were those who predicted the Iraq invasion to be a "walk in the park"... I think we all can see who was full of crap now? There were those who were SURE that WMD were sitting in Bagdhad and would PROVE Bush right... Some dope said we didn't NEED large numbers of ground forces... UMMM,, wrong... and so on and so on... Those people REFUSED to listen to the experts IN THEIR FIELD who tried to advise them. This administration doesn't CARE what's true and what's not... they care about their own agenda and will pay to hear what they WANT TO HEAR....
Just so you are clear on one thing: I think Bush is a liar. I think everything the Republicans have said about global warming and the environment has been arranged by paid liars who want to push their agenda. That having been said, I also belive that everything the Democrats and environmentalists have said about global warming and the environment has been arranged by paid liars who want to push their agenda. The one camp wants to push an agenda of unlimited environmental looting without regard for consequences, the other camp wants to push an agenda of unlimited governmental control without regard for consequences. As far as I'm concerned both camps can puke and die. If it's in the media being pushed as a "public interest story", you can bet money it was something put together by some think tank trying to push some garbage on the rest of us.
#47. To: Elliott Jackalope (#46)
Yea, a lot has been foisted on us "useless eaters" hasn't it?
I took it directly off of UNH's website where the studies were actually done. It is NOT a media thing or a partisan agenda. It is in science journals, NOT the local papers. I agree with your view of BOTH sides of the POLITICAL ballgame. However, I don't think that the assaults on the environment are something to ignore. There is too much to lose if there is much truth in the science. A close friend is in the business of studying weather and the environment all over the world. In his 25 years in the business, he's seeing alarming things. We have a wake up call right now. Right now is the time to let the scientists DO their studies and to listen to their results when they are done. NOT to listen to paid liars on EITHER side. Thanks for clarifying.
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#4. To: avian virus (#2)
Rush could then spew the results on the radio to the bots could repeat them on FR and LP. Wouldn't this make the problem go away?
#8. To: timetobuildaboat (#4)
#10. To: avian virus (#8)
A place where I used to work had a great graph of CO2 levels and temperature for about the past 1000 years. One thing I saw was that the average mean temperature reached a peak in about 1929, when the dust bowel hit.
#14. To: purpleman (#10)
Are you talking about continental U.S. or the Northern hemisphere? It's not true for worldwide temperature as this graph shows:
#15. To: avian virus (#14)
It looks like something from Limbaugh's site.
This data set has been created using the following steps:
#21. To: purpleman (#15)
#28. To: Elliott Jackalope (#21)
#42. To: avian virus (#28)
If you read some of the serious stuff on this, I think you'll see that nobody thinks we can suddenly get conservation conscious and stop it. We are now past the point of no return. We need to be sensible to keep the process for accerating, but most of the concern is about trying to figure out what is going to happen and what we are going to do about it. Some huge droughts and some very violent weather is expected. Also serious flooding in other areas. Good crop growing regions may dry up in the next thirty years and formerly arid regions my become very wet.
#46. To: siagiah (#42)
Replies to Comment # 46. If it's in the media being pushed as a "public interest story", you can bet money it was something put together by some think tank trying to push some garbage on the rest of us.
#48. To: Elliott Jackalope (#46)
End Trace Mode for Comment # 46.