<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;">I don't know why people are terribly worried about the sea water rising 7 meters. So what?<br>Idaho is lot higher than that. <br><br>Best Regards,<br><br>Donovan<br><br><br>--- On <b>Thu, 2/26/09, nickgier@roadrunner.com <i><nickgier@roadrunner.com></i></b> wrote:<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;">From: nickgier@roadrunner.com <nickgier@roadrunner.com><br>Subject: [Vision2020] Ice in east Antarctica a bigger threat long term<br>To: vision2020@moscow.com<br>Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 8:41 AM<br><br><pre>Ice in east Antarctica a bigger threat long term<br>Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:02 AM EST<br>The Associated Press<br>By CHARLES J. HANLEY<br><br>TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica (AP) — Antarctica's western ice sheet<br>is pushing ever faster into the sea, but scientists
know an even greater<br>long-term threat lies here in the vast, little-explored whiteness of east<br>Antarctica.<br><br>An "absolutely titanic" store of ice that sits atop the east<br>Antarctic plateau should be more closely monitored by glaciologists, the<br>world's thinly spread corps of ice specialists, says Ted Scambos, a leading<br>U.S. expert whose team last weekend finished a two-month scientific expedition<br>across the forbidding plateau.<br><br>Scambos and Tom <span>Neumann</span>, leader of that joint U.S.-Norwegian<br>"traverse" from the South Pole to this Norwegian outpost, commented<br>Wednesday after the release in Geneva of a report summarizing initial findings<br>from the 2007-2009 International Polar Year (IPY), a program of intensified<br>research in the polar regions.<br><br>That report said west Antarctica has been warming, ice shelves floating on the<br>sea fringing the west coast are weakening, and the glaciers they hold back
are<br>pouring ice faster into the sea.<br><br>The report doesn't forecast immediate Antarctic disasters because of global<br>warming. Scientists point out, however, that if the western ice sheet ever<br>collapsed completely, it would add some 7 meters to sea levels worldwide.<br><br>East Antarctica's ice appears more stable than the west's — "I<br>wouldn't say it's stable, but more stable," said Neumann — but it<br>has the theoretical potential to add some 200 feet (60 meters) to sea levels in<br>centuries to come, scientists say. Even a small, more immediate shift here could<br>raise oceans significantly.<br><br>Concerned Norwegian researchers plan to investigate the state of the Fimbul Ice<br>Shelf, a gigantic table of thick ice reaching 120 miles into the sea at the<br>coast 100 miles north of this research station, which sits in a stony mountain<br>valley hemmed in by glaciers rumbling in slow motion toward the far-off
southern<br>Atlantic.<br><br>Kim Holmen, research director for the Norwegian Polar Institute, which operates<br>Troll, took note of the melting ice shelves of the west.<br><br>"This is something we think is happening to the ice shelves in Dronning<br>Maud Land," he said, referring to this Norwegian-claimed sector of east<br>Antarctica. "The water coming in under the shelves is 1-degree (Celsius)<br>warmer" — almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit.<br><br>Scambos, lead scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center at the<br>University of Colorado, pointed out that a recently published research paper in<br>the journal Nature indicated that east Antarctica, contrary to earlier<br>scientific belief, has been warming in recent decades.<br><br>"Our preliminary results support that," he said of the traverse<br>expedition's research. "The temperature measurements we were able to<br>make looks like there was a very slight warming."<br><br>The 12-member
U.S.-Norwegian team drilled deep cores into the eastern ice sheet<br>to assess recent and historical climate trends, checked ice thickness with<br>radar, and made other measurements. They drove the 1,400 miles (2,300<br>kilometers) in a caravan of snow tractors pulling research, kitchen and sleeping<br>modules on giant skis.<br><br>The interior of east Antarctica is almost entirely unexplored. "The area<br>we traveled through had not been visited by a scientific traverse since the<br>1960s," said NASA glaciologist Neumann.<br><br>"This part of Antarctica is approximately the same size as Greenland and<br>we don't know very much about it," he said. "But I hope our data<br>on the ground will allow us to make a much better assessment of how this area is<br>changing."<br><br>That will take months of follow-up analysis. Meantime, Scambos said,<br>Wednesday's IPY report "gives us an idea of what sort of trouble we are<br>getting ourselves into if we don't
begin to turn around the impact of<br>greenhouse gases on climate."<br><br>=======================================================<br> List services made available by First Step Internet, <br> serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994. <br> http://www.fsr.net <br> mailto:Vision2020@moscow.com<br>=======================================================</pre></blockquote></td></tr></table><br>