A naled, or aufeis, in the flesh. Er, ice.
It sounds like science fiction, but, like so many science fiction-ish ideas in the age of radical adaption to climate change, it’s real: Mongolia is launching a $750,000 geoengineering project to freeze vast quantities of the Tuul River in order to cool its capital city of Ulan Bataar during the sweltering summer, and to provide drinking water as the ice melts, as well. While specifics about exactly how the cooling will work are scarce, details about the freezing process are not, as it will mimic a natural process that already occurs on rivers in the north.
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On the left, in the 1999 edition; on the right, in 2011. Click to embiggenate.
[Originally published 9/16] Greenland glaciers have had a hard time of it lately, what with all the warming and disintegrating, and in their latest edition, the folks at the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World have decided to illustrate the island’s new look: as you can see above, lots and lots less white. The warming has even created a new island off the east coast: look closely just under the “Gr” in “Greenland Sea,” and you can see the words “Uunartoq Qeqertoq (Warming I.)”
If we are looking at a radically reshaped world in the next hundred years or more, maybe atlases will have to be more like dictionaries from here on out, recording the dynamic nature of their subject matter.
[Update 9/19: Scientists at the UK's Scott Polar Institute have written a letter to the Times saying that the image above is inaccurate; less ice has melted in the last 15 years than the atlas's image shows. The atlas's publishers, HarperCollins, respond that they created the image using data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, and that it represents not only changes due to warming but also "much more accurate data and in-depth research" than had previously been available. Regardless of the causes, however, the image doesn't resemble current satellite images, the Scott Polar group says. Check out a comparison of the images here. What do you think?]
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Fiordland National Park in New Zealand, the location of the study
What’s the News: Researchers have mapped out the detailed geological history of a 300-square-mile chunk of New Zealand, from 2.5 million years ago to the present day. The study showed how glaciers carved out the area’s distinctive valleys using a little-known technique called thermochronometry, which involves shooting proton beams onto rocks and making note of what happens—along with some impressive analytical skills.
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The glaciers that form atop mountains can act like a saw or sandpaper, wearing away material as they slide and preventing the peaks from ascending too high. Until now, that’s been the consensus notion of how glaciers shape mountains. But whatever your tool shop metaphor of choice might be, neither saws nor sanders work if the glaciers don’t move. That might explain what’s happening in the far reaches of southern South America, where, scientists led by Stuart Thomson report in Nature, glaciers are not wearing down the Andes Mountains but are actually protecting them from erosion.
In the more temperate part of the range, from 38˚ to 49˚ south latitude, the glacial grinder has shaved off as much as 1000 meters from the mountains’ peaks, flattened their slopes, and smoothed their surfaces. But farther south, between 49˚ and 56˚ latitude, the mountains have been spared: The peaks are higher—some nearly 4000 meters—and the ridges are much more rugged. [ScienceNOW]
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Why is Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier losing so much ice into the sea? Because, researchers say, it has come unstuck at the bottom.
The Western Ice Sheet in Antarctica contains “enough water to raise global sea levels by several metres,” Christian Schoof writes in an accompanying commentary on the paper in Nature Geoscience, and so the high rate of ice loss in place like Pine Island is a worry. But the force of the atmosphere, even if you accounted for a warming Antarctica, doesn’t explain the melting rate. So the British Antarctic Survey team led by Adrian Jenkins ventured a guess that something else was going on under the ice, and sent a robot to investigate.
What the autonomous underwater bot found was pretty jarring.
In just a few decades — since the 1970s — the relatively warm deep ocean water flowing beneath the cold, buoyant glacier meltwater has encroached inland under the glacier some 30 km, or 18.6 miles, and the pace of the outflow of Pine Island Glacier continues to accelerate [Discovery News].
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The volcanic eruption in Iceland that has disrupted air traffic in Europe is also a reminder that other volcanoes in the region could wake up if global warming continues unabated, experts say.
Scientists say that if large icecaps on the island melt, they’ll ease the pressure on the rocks beneath the surface. Lifting the weight off the rocks would allow for more magma production, which could set off other eruptions. Says volcanologist Freysteinn Sigmundsson: “Our work suggests that eventually there will be either somewhat larger eruptions or more frequent eruptions in Iceland in coming decades” [Scientific American].
Scientists clarified that while the current Eyjafjallajokull eruption occurred beneath a small glacier in Iceland, the explosion was not caused by global warming. The Eyjafjallajokull glacier is too small and light to have an impact on local geology, they say.
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Don’t be fooled by the name—Iceland is one of the hottest hotspots in the world, geologically speaking. The island’s volcanic legacy reared its head again yesterday as a massive eruption by a volcano beneath a glacier caused the evacuation of hundreds of residents and created ash clouds that delayed flights all around Northern Europe.
The volcano, called Eyjafjallajokull, rumbled last month, but that was nothing like this. “This is a very much more violent eruption, because it’s interacting with ice and water,” said Andy Russell, an expert in glacial flooding at the University of Newcastle in northern England. “It becomes much more explosive, instead of a nice lava flow oozing out of the ground” [AP]. The flood caused by melted glacial ice caused the evacuation about 800 people. Waters threatened to spill over onto Highway 1, Iceland’s main highway that makes a circuit around the island. But some quick digging by construction crews altered the course of the water.
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Just when the whole “ClimateGate” affair had retreated from the headlines, other climate scientists have stepped in to shoot themselves in the foot in the public spotlight. In a new slow-simmering controversy that reached major news outlets this week, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Rajendra Pachauri admitted that one of the details in the 2007 report was a mistake. Though the goof is a minor one (in that it doesn’t change the conclusion of the report), the backlash probably won’t be, given what happened the last time around.
Specifically, one part of the report states that the Himalayan glaciers are retreating faster than anywhere else in the world, and that there’s a good chance they could totally disappear by 2035. But while it’s true that the glaciers are retreating, the date given is a gross overstatement. “You just can’t accomplish it,” says Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona. “If you think about the thicknesses of the ice – 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick – and if you’re losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let’s say double it to two metres a year, you’re not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century” [BBC News].
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Global warming typically takes the rap for melting glaciers, but in the case of the Himalayan mountain range’s dwindling ice, it could have a co-conspirator: soot. Today, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, scientists said that the black carbon spewed out as industrial pollution from the heavily populated areas nearby could be a much larger contributor to glacier melt than previously thought.
First, NASA’s William Lau says, atmospheric circulation leaves a layer of soot at the base of the Himalayas, and that soot then combines with dust and forms an opaque cloud that absorbs energy. As this layer heats up in the Himalayan foothills, it rises and enhances the seasonal northward flow of humid monsoon winds, forcing moisture and hot air up the slopes of the majestic mountain range. As these particles rise on the warm, overturning air masses, they produce more rain over northern India, which further warms the atmosphere and fuels this “heat pump” that draws even more warm air to the region [LiveScience].
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Climate change doesn’t affect all places equally, and while Greenland and West Antarctica’s glaciers have started slipping into the sea at an alarming rate, East Antarctica was actually gaining ice. But now that could be changing, as a Nature Geoscience study done with data from NASA’s gravity-measuring satellites called GRACE suggests that the area could now be losing mass.
East Antarctica is far too cold, even in summer, for any appreciable melting to happen. And since a warmer world means more precipitation, any extra snow that falls on East Antarctica stays there indefinitely. But, starting in 2006, GRACE began to detect lower gravity over East Antarctica, suggesting that the ice sheet was getting less massive [TIME].
The scientists note that there is a huge uncertainty in their numbers: GRACE data suggests a 57 billion-ton-per-year loss, plus or minus 52 billion tons. (The reason is that the bedrock beneath Antarctica could be bouncing back slightly with less ice to weigh it down, which would cross up GRACE’s readings.) Some researchers are not convinced that the continent is losing mass, since the margins for error in the team’s analysis range between 5 and 109 billion tonnes of ice loss per year [New Scientist].
While the amount of East Antarctica ice loss remains in doubt, you can’t miss the huge chunks of Antarctic ice that have floated up near New Zealand this week and posed dangers for shipping. This is only the second time in 78 years that large Antarctic icebergs have been sighted so far north. The previous occasion was in late 2006 when icebergs could be seen from the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island, even from the hills around Christchurch [CNN].
Related Content:
80beats: Fossils of Shrimp-Like Creatures Point to Warmer Antarctica in the Distant Past
80beats: Floods Beneath Antarctica’s Ice Sheet Create a Glacial Slip-and-Slide
80beats: Antarctica is Definitely Feeling the Heat from Global Warming
DISCOVER: Grace in Space looked at the Grace satellites in detail
80beats: From 300 Miles Up, [Grace] Satellites See Water Crisis in India’s Future
Image: flickr / giladr
The glaciers that shine at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, could vanish entirely within 15 years, according to a somber new report. Says glaciologist Lonnie Thompson: “Of the ice cover present in 1912 … 85% has disappeared and 26% of that present in 2000 is now gone” [USA Today]. The mountaintop glaciers are both shrinking around the edges and growing thinner, Thompson’s team found. If the current rate of ice loss continues, the mountain could be ice free as early as 2022.
Thompson says his team has fresh evidence that global warming is to blame. As similar changes are occurring on other mountains in Africa, South America, and in the Himalayas, Thompson says that global climate change, not local weather effects, must be responsible for the receding ice. “The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause,” Thompson said [AP].
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After 120,000 years of slumbering in a Greenland glacier beneath almost two miles of ice, an ultra-small bacteria has been resurrected by the patient efforts of scientists. After incubating the bacteria for almost a year in water that was just above freezing temperature, colonies of the tiny purple-brown bacteria began to grow in a petri dish. Researchers say the bacteria’s resilience provides clues to how life can survive in hostile environments like the Arctic–and maybe even other planets.
The Herminiimonas glaciei bug is not the oldest to ever be resurrected, but it’s the first “ultramicrobacteria” to be revived. Ultramicrobacteria, tiny even by bacterial standards, are about 10 to 50 times smaller than the common human intestinal microbe E. coli. Their diminutive size could give the bacteria a survival advantage over other microorganisms. H. glaciei, for example, is thought to have survived in thin capillaries of nutrient-rich water in the Greenland glacier that would have been too tight a fit for larger bacteria [National Geographic News].
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A radar survey conducted between 2004 and 2008 by Japanese, Chinese, and British scientists reveals how the ice on Antarctica grew, and what the land looks like beneath the ice. At the center of the continent, a nearly two-mile-thick slab of ice has clung to Antarctica’s rocky surface for 14 million years; this is the first time scientists have gotten a virtual glimpse beneath the sheet’s surface.
The topography beneath the ice is mountainous, with peaks and valleys like the European Alps, according the study published Nature. Scientists say that 34 million years ago, small glaciers expanded from the mountaintops and shifted to carve out the terrain. To collect the data, scientists drove huge trains of caterpillar tractors in tight lines over Dome A, a plateau of ice at the heart of Antarctica. The tractors carried radars that pinged down through the ice and sent back profiles of the frozen rock landscape below [New Scientist]. Scientists knew the velocity of the radar’s radio waves, so they calculated the depth of the ice by timing how long it took the waves to hit the rock and come back to the surface.
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If global warming melts the West Antarctic ice sheet, the thick slab of ice that covers an area the size of Texas, the situation for coastal dwellers around the world may not be as dire as previously estimated. A new study, which has sparked some debate, suggests that the water released by West Antarctica‘s melting glaciers would raise sea levels by about 10 feet, not the 15 to 20 feet that had previously been predicted.
While the results sound like good news, Antarctic experts and the study’s lead author, Jonathan L. Bamber of the Bristol Glaciology Center in England, agreed that the odds of a disruptive rise in seas over the next century or so from the buildup of greenhouse gases remained serious enough to warrant the world’s attention [The New York Times]. They also note that some regions would also experience a larger surge in sea levels than others. “Sea level rise is not uniform across the world’s oceans, partly as a result of disruptions to the Earth’s gravity field,” explained Professor Bamber. “It turns out that the maximum increase in sea level rise is centred at a latitude of about 40 degrees along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards of North America.” This would include cities such as San Francisco and New York [BBC News].
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Life sure turns up in the darnedest places. The latest discovery comes from Blood Falls, a rusty red discolouration on the face of the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica [that] occasionally gushes forth a transparent, briny, iron-rich liquid that quickly oxidizes and turns red, staining the ice below [Nature News].
The source of that water is an intensely salty lake trapped beneath 1,300 feet of ice, and a new study has now found that microbes have carved out a niche for themselves in that inhospitable environment, living on sulfur and iron compounds. The bacteria colony has been isolated there for about 1.5 million years, researchers say, ever since the glacier rolled over the lake and created a cold, dark, oxygen-poor ecosystem.
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