[Vision2020] Ice in east Antarctica a bigger threat long term

[Donovan Arnold]

I don't know why people are terribly worried about the sea water rising 7 meters. So what?
Idaho is lot higher than that. 

Best Regards,

Donovan


--- On Thu, 2/26/09, nickgier at roadrunner.com <nickgier at roadrunner.com> wrote:
From: nickgier at roadrunner.com <nickgier at roadrunner.com>
Subject: [Vision2020] Ice in east Antarctica a bigger threat long term
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 8:41 AM

Ice in east Antarctica a bigger threat long term
Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:02 AM EST
The Associated Press
By CHARLES J. HANLEY

TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica (AP) — Antarctica's western ice sheet
is pushing ever faster into the sea, but scientists know an even greater
long-term threat lies here in the vast, little-explored whiteness of east
Antarctica.

An "absolutely titanic" store of ice that sits atop the east
Antarctic plateau should be more closely monitored by glaciologists, the
world's thinly spread corps of ice specialists, says Ted Scambos, a leading
U.S. expert whose team last weekend finished a two-month scientific expedition
across the forbidding plateau.

Scambos and Tom Neumann, leader of that joint U.S.-Norwegian
"traverse" from the South Pole to this Norwegian outpost, commented
Wednesday after the release in Geneva of a report summarizing initial findings
from the 2007-2009 International Polar Year (IPY), a program of intensified
research in the polar regions.

That report said west Antarctica has been warming, ice shelves floating on the
sea fringing the west coast are weakening, and the glaciers they hold back are
pouring ice faster into the sea.

The report doesn't forecast immediate Antarctic disasters because of global
warming. Scientists point out, however, that if the western ice sheet ever
collapsed completely, it would add some 7 meters to sea levels worldwide.

East Antarctica's ice appears more stable than the west's — "I
wouldn't say it's stable, but more stable," said Neumann — but it
has the theoretical potential to add some 200 feet (60 meters) to sea levels in
centuries to come, scientists say. Even a small, more immediate shift here could
raise oceans significantly.

Concerned Norwegian researchers plan to investigate the state of the Fimbul Ice
Shelf, a gigantic table of thick ice reaching 120 miles into the sea at the
coast 100 miles north of this research station, which sits in a stony mountain
valley hemmed in by glaciers rumbling in slow motion toward the far-off southern
Atlantic.

Kim Holmen, research director for the Norwegian Polar Institute, which operates
Troll, took note of the melting ice shelves of the west.

"This is something we think is happening to the ice shelves in Dronning
Maud Land," he said, referring to this Norwegian-claimed sector of east
Antarctica. "The water coming in under the shelves is 1-degree (Celsius)
warmer" — almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center at the
University of Colorado, pointed out that a recently published research paper in
the journal Nature indicated that east Antarctica, contrary to earlier
scientific belief, has been warming in recent decades.

"Our preliminary results support that," he said of the traverse
expedition's research. "The temperature measurements we were able to
make looks like there was a very slight warming."

The 12-member U.S.-Norwegian team drilled deep cores into the eastern ice sheet
to assess recent and historical climate trends, checked ice thickness with
radar, and made other measurements. They drove the 1,400 miles (2,300
kilometers) in a caravan of snow tractors pulling research, kitchen and sleeping
modules on giant skis.

The interior of east Antarctica is almost entirely unexplored. "The area
we traveled through had not been visited by a scientific traverse since the
1960s," said NASA glaciologist Neumann.

"This part of Antarctica is approximately the same size as Greenland and
we don't know very much about it," he said. "But I hope our data
on the ground will allow us to make a much better assessment of how this area is
changing."

That will take months of follow-up analysis. Meantime, Scambos said,
Wednesday's IPY report "gives us an idea of what sort of trouble we are
getting ourselves into if we don't begin to turn around the impact of
greenhouse gases on climate."

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