Mysterious Clouds Creeping Out of the Arctic

[waltky]

More land to fight over now...

New land surfaces in Arctic tug-of-war
Wed., Oct. 31, 2007 : Warming, retreating sea ice expose new areas as nations vie for control

A rocky outcrop found off the northern coast of Greenland could open up a new front in the looming battle for control of the Arctic and the North Pole. The best candidate to date for the world's northernmost point of land — a mythical place sought by explorers for centuries — was spotted in July during an expedition led by Arctic veteran Dennis Schmitt.

California-based Schmitt, best-known for his 2005 discovery of Warming Island off the eastern coast of Greenland, named it Stray Dog West because, he said, it "erred under the ice." It was exposed mainly by shifting pack ice. As Greenland is under Denmark's administration, this scrap of land just 125-feet long could extend Danish territory further north and strengthen Copenhagen's claim on the pole.

Its discovery comes as countries around the Arctic Ocean — the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Iceland — are rushing to stake out the Polar Basin's seabed, fishing rights and maritime routes. "This little island could have a wide international significance," said Stefan Talmon, professor of international law at Oxford University in Britain. "With the ice melting, more and more of these islands could emerge and play a role in maritime delimitations."

More New land surfaces in Arctic tug-of-war - Climate Change - MSNBC.com

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North Pole trip may be impossible
1 Nov 2007, Trips over ice to the North Pole may be impossible in summer in just a decade or two because of global warming, according to one of the world's leading polar adventurers.

Norwegian Boerge Ousland, who has skied alone across the Arctic Ocean and the Antarctic, said he would recommend one piece of equipment for anyone planning a trek to the North Pole in a few years' time: a kayak. "It's a bit strange to think that the trips I have been doing may not be possible in 10-20 years," he said after attending a climate seminar in the Norwegian parliament. "But it may well happen."

That would end just over a century of trips across the ice - American Robert Peary was the first to claim to reach the North Pole in 1909. "Over time I have seen the changes myself," said Ousland, aged 45, who has been to the north pole several times. On a first trip in 1990 the ice was about three meters thick around the North Pole. "Now it is 30% thinner," he said.

There were also far more and wider gaps in the ice with open water, requiring risky swims in a special survival suit while tugging provisions and other gear along in a floating sledge. The Arctic ice shrank in September 2007 to the smallest on record, eclipsing a 2005 low, according to US satellite data.

It is now expanding again as winter approaches but many climate scientists say that the ice could vanish in summer well before the end of the century because of a build-up of greenhouse gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels. And the summer ice now starts several hundred kilometers further north than a century ago. Few expeditions can now begin from Russia's Cape Arkticheskiy, as Ousland did in 1990, because a helicopter ride is needed to reach firm ice.

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[waltky]

Warm zones getting larger...

Earth's Tropics Belt Expands
Sunday, December 2, 2007 WASHINGTON -- Earth's tropical belt seems to have expanded a couple hundred miles over the past quarter century, which could mean more arid weather for some already dry subtropical regions, new climate research shows.

Geographically, the tropical region is a wide swath around Earth's middle stretching from the Tropic of Cancer, just south of Miami, to the Tropic of Capricorn, which cuts Australia almost in half. It's about one-quarter of the globe and generally thought of as hot, steamy and damp, but it also has areas of brutal desert. To meteorologists, however, the tropics region is defined by long-term climate and what's happening in the atmosphere. Recent studies show changes that indicate an expansion of the tropical atmosphere.

The newest study, published Sunday in the new scientific journal Nature Geoscience, shows that by using the weather definition, the tropics are expanding toward Earth's poles more than predicted. And that means more dry weather is moving to the edges of the tropics in places like the U.S. Southwest. Independent teams using four different meteorological measurements found that the tropical atmospheric belt has grown by anywhere between 2 and 4.8 degrees latitude since 1979. That translates to a total north and south expansion of 140 to 330 miles.

One key determination of the tropical belt is called the Hadley circulation, which is essentially prevailing rivers of wind that move vertically as well as horizontally, carrying lots of moisture to rainy areas while drying out arid regions on the edges of the tropics. That wind is circulating over a larger area than a couple decades ago. But that's not the only type of change meteorologists have found that shows an expansion of the tropics. They've seen more tropical conditions by measuring the amount of ozone in the atmosphere, measuring the depth of the lower atmosphere, and the level of dryness in the atmosphere at the edges of the tropics.

Climate scientists have long predicted a growing tropical belt toward the end of the 21st century because of man-made global warming. But what has happened in the past quarter century is larger and more puzzling than initially predicted, said Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Silver Spring, Md. She is the author of the newest study. "They are big changes," she said. "It's a little puzzling." She said this expansion may only be temporary, but there's no way of knowing yet.

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Living in Louisville, I have noticed that the winters and summers are more like that of Nashville, which is a couple hundred miles south of Louisville, the past couple of years. Has Nashville's temp zone shifted northward? Can't say for sure, but it doesn't seem to get as cold in the winter while being hotter in the summer than it used to be around here.

[waltky]

Granny says we is in the end times...

Report links weather-related disasters with climate change
Dec. 9, 2007 -- The equivalent of a third of the world's population has already been affected by weather-related disasters and this is set to soar because of climate change unless urgent international action is taken, according to a report issued here this week.

Governments must commit at least 50 billion U.S. dollars every year to helping the world's most vulnerable communities prepare to save their own lives and livelihoods, says the report "Climate of Disaster" published by Tearfund, one of the UK's leading relief and development agencies.

In the past 10 years, weather-related disasters have killed over 443,000 people, affected 2.5 billion people and cost an estimated 600 billion U.S. dollars in economic losses. With climate change increasing the number and intensity of extreme events such as floods and droughts, more and more people are becoming vulnerable to a range of environmental disasters, according to the report.

Without urgent action, this trend is set to rise, leading to unprecedented levels of suffering and deaths. Poor people will be hit hardest as they are the least able to cope, and live in the most vulnerable areas of the world. With each new disaster, precious gains made in poverty eradication are swept away, warns the report.

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[waltky]

Greenland ice cap melting faster than first thought...

Greenland ice sheet melting at record rate
10 Dec 2007 - The Greenland ice sheet melted at a record rate this year, the largest ever since satellite measurements began in 1979, a top climate scientist reported on Monday.

"The amount of ice lost by Greenland over the last year is the equivalent of two times all the ice in the Alps, or a layer of water more than one-half mile (800 meters) deep covering Washington DC," said Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Using data from military and weather satellites to see where the ice is melting, Steffen and his colleagues were able to monitor the rapid thinning and acceleration of ice as it moved into the ocean at the edge of the big arctic island. The extent of the melt area was 10 percent greater than the last record year, 2005, the scientists found.

Greenland is about one-fourth the size of the United States and about 80 percent of it is covered by the ice sheet. One-twentieth of the world's ice is in Greenland; if it all melted it would be equivalent to a 21-foot (6.4 metre) global sea level rise, the scientists said. One factor in the speed-up of Greenland's ice melt is an increase in cylindrical shafts in the ice called moulins. These huge tunnels in the ice act like drains and appear to let the ice sheet respond more rapidly than researchers expected to spikes in temperature at the beginning of the annual warm season, Steffen said.

In recent years, melting has started earlier in the year than normal. Air temperatures on the ice sheet have risen by about 7 degrees F (3.9 degrees C) since 1991, mostly because of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the scientists said in research presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. This is in keeping with persistently gloomy news about the state of the Arctic this year. In October, a U.S. government "report card" found less ice, hotter air and dying wildlife. In May, a U.S. expert at the National Snow and Ice Center in Colorado found that Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N10178654.htm

[waltky]

Wonder if solar activity is heating the magma?...

Greenland Glaciers Getting Heat From Underground Magma
December 14, 2007 - Some scientists now say that underground magma, along with warming surface temperatures, might be contributing to melting glaciers in Greenland.

Researchers say that a thin spot on the Earth's crust is enabling the hot magma underground to melt the ice. While no one knows if the molten magma is now contributing to ice melt in Greenland, it is known that heat from inside the Earth has been used to heat homes there since the 10th century when residents harnessed hot springs as a heating source. Water in a hot spring is heated either by geothermal heat from the Earth's interior or by coming in contact with hot magma, scientists say.

Researchers say they don't the temperature of the hot spot under a recently discovered ice stream in Greenland. "Crustal heat flow is still one of the unknowns -- and it's a fairly significant one, according to our preliminary results," lead researcher Ralph von Frese said in a statement. Von Frese, who is a professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University also said that while the way major ice sheets behave is "an important barometer of global climate change" that to understand climate change they had to be able to "effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change" and understand "natural impacts."

Early results of the study on the situation in Greenland were presented Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco by a graduate student who worked on the study with von Frese. The melting glaciers have a particular significance for Americans, as the water from them flows into the sea raising sea levels around the world. "The complete melting of these continental ice sheets would put much of Florida, as well as New Orleans, New York City and other important coastal population centers, under water," von Frese said.

Greenland Glaciers Getting Heat From Underground Magma | December 15, 2007 | AHN

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Is a New Solar Cycle Beginning?
Dec. 14, 2007: The solar physics community is abuzz this week. No, there haven't been any great eruptions or solar storms. The source of the excitement is a modest knot of magnetism that popped over the sun's eastern limb on Dec. 11th, pictured below in a pair of images from the orbiting Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

It may not look like much, but "this patch of magnetism could be a sign of the next solar cycle," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. For more than a year, the sun has been experiencing a lull in activity, marking the end of Solar Cycle 23, which peaked with many furious storms in 2000--2003. "Solar minimum is upon us," he says. The big question now is, when will the next solar cycle begin?

"New solar cycles always begin with a high-latitude, reversed polarity sunspot," explains Hathaway. "Reversed polarity " means a sunspot with opposite magnetic polarity compared to sunspots from the previous solar cycle. "High-latitude" refers to the sun's grid of latitude and longitude. Old cycle spots congregate near the sun's equator. New cycle spots appear higher, around 25 or 30 degrees latitude.

The region that appeared on Dec. 11th fits both these criteria. It is high latitude (24 degrees N) and magnetically reversed. Just one problem: There is no sunspot. So far the region is just a bright knot of magnetic fields. If, however, these fields coalesce into a dark sunspot, scientists are ready to announce that Solar Cycle 24 has officially begun.

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[waltky]

Oceans dying?...

Study: Deep-Sea Species' Loss Could Lead To Oceans' Collapse
Friday, December 28, 2007 - The loss of deep-sea species poses a severe threat to the future of the oceans, suggests a new report in Current Biology.

In a global-scale study, the researchers found some of the first evidence that the health of the deep sea, as measured by the rate of critical ecosystem processes, increases exponentially with the diversity of species living there. “For the first time, we have demonstrated that deep-sea ecosystem functioning is closely dependent upon the number of species inhabiting the ocean floor,” said Roberto Danovaro of the Polytechnic University of Marche, in Italy. “This shows that we need to preserve biodiversity, and especially deep-sea biodiversity, because otherwise the negative consequences could be unprecedented. We must care about species that are far from us and [essentially] invisible.”

Ecosystem functioning involves several processes, which can be summarized as the production, consumption, and transfer of organic matter to higher levels of the food chain, the decomposition of organic matter, and the regeneration of nutrients, he explained. Recent investigations on land have suggested that biodiversity loss might impair the functioning and sustainability of ecosystems, Danovaro said. However, the data needed to evaluate the consequences of biodiversity loss on the ocean floor had been completely lacking, despite the fact that the deep sea covers 65% of the Earth and is “by far the most important ecosystem for the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus of the biosphere.” The deep sea also supports the largest “biomass” of living things, including a large proportion of undiscovered species.

In the new study, Danovaro’s team examined the biodiversity of nematode worms and several independent indicators of ecosystem functioning and efficiency at 116 deep-sea sites. Nematodes are the most abundant animals on earth and account for more than 90% of all life at the bottom of the sea. Earlier studies have also suggested that nematode diversity is a good proxy for the diversity of other deep-sea species. They found that sites with a higher diversity of nematodes support exponentially higher rates of ecosystem processes and an increased efficiency with which those processes are performed. Efficiency reflects the ability of an ecosystem to exploit the available energy in the form of food sources, the researchers said. Overall, they added, “our results suggest that a higher biodiversity can enhance the ability of deep-sea benthic systems to perform the key biological and biogeochemical processes that are crucial for their sustainable functioning.”

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[waltky]

Just as I suspected, its both...

Nature and man jointly cook Arctic
Wed Jan 2, 2008 - There's more to the recent dramatic and alarming thawing of the Arctic region than can be explained by man-made global warming alone, a new study found. Nature is pushing the Arctic to the edge, too.

There's a natural cause that may account for much of the Arctic warming, which has melted sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. New research points a finger at a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle.

But that energy transfer, which comes with storms that head north because of ocean currents, is not acting alone either, scientists say. Another upcoming study concludes that the combination of both that natural energy transfer increase and man-made global warming serve as a one-two punch that is pushing the Arctic over the edge.

Scientists are trying to figure out why the Arctic is warming and melting faster than computer models predict. The summer of 2007, like the summer of 2005, smashed all records for loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and ice sheet in Greenland. In September, the Arctic Ocean had 23 percent less sea ice than the previous record low. Greenland's ice sheet melted 19 billion tons more than its previous record.

The Nature study suggests there's more behind it than global warming because the air a couple miles above the ground is warming more than calculated by the climate models. Climate change theory concentrates on warming of surface temperatures and explains an Arctic that is warming faster than the rest of the world as mostly because reduced sea ice and ice sheets means less reflecting solar rays.

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North Atlantic warming tied to natural variability
January 3, 2008 - A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean’s surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the change was not uniform. In fact, the subpolar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed.

This striking pattern can be explained largely by the influence of a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), wrote authors of a study published Thursday, Jan. 3, in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Winds that power the NAO are driven by atmospheric pressure differences between areas around Iceland and the Azores. “The winds have a tremendous impact on the underlying ocean,” said Susan Lozier, a professor of physical oceanography at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences who is the study’s first author.

Other studies cited in the Science Express report suggest human-caused global warming may be affecting recent ocean heating trends. But Lozier and her coauthors found their data can’t support that view for the North Atlantic. “It is premature to conclusively attribute these regional patterns of heat gain to greenhouse warming,” they wrote. “The take-home message is that the NAO produces strong natural variability,” said Lozier in an interview. “The simplistic view of global warming is that everything forward in time will warm uniformly. But this very strong natural variability is superimposed on human-caused warming. So researchers will need to unravel that natural variability to get at the part humans are responsible for.”

In research supported by the National Science Foundation in the United States and the Natural Environment Research Council in the United Kingdom, her international team analyzed 50 years of North Atlantic temperature records collected at the National Oceanic Data Center in Washington, D.C. To piece together the mechanisms involved in the observed changes, their analysis employed an ocean circulation model that predicts how winds, evaporation, precipitation and the exchange of heat with the atmosphere influences the North Atlantic’s heat content over time. They also compared those computer predictions to real observations “to test the model’s skill,” the authors wrote.

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[waltky]

New solar cycle confirmed...

Sunspot signals new solar cycle
Jan. 7, 2008 -- U.S. researchers say the first sunspot of a new solar cycle has appeared in the sun's Northern Hemisphere.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the new 11-year cycle of heightened solar activity brings increased risks for power grids, critical military, civilian and airline communications, global positioning system signals, and even cell phones and automated teller machine transactions.

"This sunspot is like the first robin of spring," solar physicist Douglas Biesecker of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said in a release. "In this case, it's an early omen of solar storms that will gradually increase over the next few years." A sunspot is an area of highly organized magnetic activity on the surface of the sun.

During a solar storm, highly charged material ejected from the can bring down power grids, disrupt critical communications and threaten astronauts with harmful radiation. Storms can also knock out commercial communications satellites and swamp GPS signals, NOAA said.

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[waltky]

Melting Antarctic ice will add to rising sea levels...

Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean
Sunday, 24 February 2008, A UK team finds evidence that the major glaciers draining the West Antarctic Ice Sheet are accelerating towards the sea.

UK scientists working in Antarctica have found some of the clearest evidence yet of instabilities in the ice of part of West Antarctica. If the trend continues, they say, it could lead to a significant rise in global sea level. The new evidence comes from a group of glaciers covering an area the size of Texas, in a remote and seldom visited part of West Antarctica. The "rivers of ice" have surged sharply in speed towards the ocean.

David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic Survey, explained: "It has been called the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the reason for that is that this is the area where the bed beneath the ice sheet dips down steepest towards the interior. "If there is a feedback mechanism to make the ice sheet unstable, it will be most unstable in this region."

There is good reason to be concerned. Satellite measurements have shown that three huge glaciers here have been speeding up for more than a decade. The biggest of the glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is causing the most concern.

Inhospitable conditions

Julian Scott has just returned from there. He told the BBC: "This is a very important glacier; it's putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. "It's a couple of kilometres thick, its 30km wide and it's moving at 3.5km per year, so it's putting a lot of ice into the ocean."

More BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Antarctic glaciers surge to ocean

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'Catastrophic flood' cooled Earth
February 25, 2008 - CANADIAN geologists said they can shed light on how a vast lake, trapped under the ice sheet that once smothered much of North America, drained into the sea, an event that cooled earth's climate for hundreds of years.

During the last ice age, the Laurentide Ice Sheet once covered most of Canada and parts of the northern US with a frozen crust that in some places was 3km thick. As the temperature gradually rose about 10,000 years ago, the ice receded, gouging out the hollows that would be called the Great Lakes. Beneath the ice's thinning surface, an extraordinary mass of water built up - the glacial lake Agassiz-Ojibway, a body so vast that it covered parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Ontario and Minnesota.

And then, around 8200 years ago, Agassiz-Ojibway massively drained, sending a flow of water into the Hudson Strait and into the Labrador Sea that was 15 times greater than the present discharge of the Amazon River. By some estimates, sea levels rose 14 metres as a result. How the great flood was unleashed has been a matter of debate. Some experts suggest an ice dam was smashed down, or the gushing water spewed out over the top of the icy lid.

Quebec researchers Patrick Lajeunesse and Guillaume Saint-Onge believe, though, that the outburst happened under the ice sheet, rather than above it or through it. In a study appearing today in the journal, Nature Geoscience, the pair describe how they criss-crossed Hudson Bay on a research vessel, using sonar to scan more than 10,500 km to get a picture of the bay floor.

More 'Catastrophic flood' cooled Earth | NEWS.com.au

[waltky]

How the Antarctic ice sheet was formed...

Mystery Of Antarctic Ice Sheets Solved?
Thursday, February 28, 2008 - Researcher Says It Was Cooling Oceans, After All

A team of scientists from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales travelled to Africa to find new evidence of climate change which helps explain some of the mystery surrounding the appearance of the Antarctic ice sheet. Ice sheet formation in the Antarctic is one of the most important climatic shifts in Earth’s history. However, previous temperature records show no evidence of the oceans cooling at this time, but instead suggest they actually warmed, presenting a confusing picture of the climate system which has long been a mystery in palaeoclimatology.

Now Dr Carrie Lear, Lecturer in Palaeoceanography, and her team at Cardiff have presented new temperature records using ancient sea floor mud recovered from Tanzania, East Africa. The shell chemistry of pin-head sized animals called foraminifera (“forams”) reveal that ocean temperatures did in fact cool by about 2.50C. Dr Lear said: “Forams are great tools for studying climates of the past, which helps us learn about the uncertainties of our future greenhouse climate. These new records help resolve a long-standing puzzle regarding the extent of ice-sheet growth versus global cooling, and bring climate proxy records into line with climate model simulations.

“We have been able to use the chemistry of the Tanzanian microfossils to construct records of temperature and ice volume over the interval of the big climate switch. These new records show that the world’s oceans did cool during the growth of an ice sheet, and that the volume of ice would have fitted onto Antarctica; so now the computer models of climate and the past climate data match up.”

The team at Cardiff University’s School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences will now look for evidence of the ultimate cause of the global cooling using the forams. They believe the prime suspect is a gradual reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere, combined with a ‘trigger’ time when Earth’s orbit around the sun made Antarctic summers cold enough for ice to remain frozen all year round. The research is funded by NERC and published in the March issue of the Geological Society of America's journal Geology.

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