Thread: Huge ice island breaks from Greenland glacier

An ice island four times the size of Manhattan has broken off from one of Greenland's two main glaciers in the biggest such event in the Arctic in nearly 50 years.

Published: 8:44AM BST 07 Aug 2010

The Petermann glacier on Greeland's northwest coast Photo: EPA

The flow of seawater below the glaciers is one of the main causes of ice calvings off Greenland Photo: REUTERS

The Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole and between Greenland and Canada


The new ice island, which broke off on Thursday, will enter a remote place called the Nares Strait, about 620 miles south of the North Pole between Greenland and Canada.

The ice island has an area of 100 square miles and a thickness of up to half the height of the Empire State Building, said Andreas Muenchow, professor of ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware.

Mr Muenchow said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large.
"The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson Rivers flowing for more than two years," said Mr Muenchow
"It could also keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days."
He said it was hard to judge whether the event occurred due to global warming because records on the seawater around the glacier have only been kept since 2003.
The flow of seawater below the glaciers is one of the main causes of ice calvings off Greenland.
"Nobody can claim this was caused by global warming. On the other hand nobody can claim that it wasn't," Mr Muenchow said.
Scientists have said the first six months of 2010 have been the hottest globally on record. The El Nino weather pattern has contributed to higher temperatures, but many scientists say elevated levels of man-made greenhouse gases are pushing temperatures higher.
The ice island could fuse to land, break up into smaller pieces, or slowly move south where it could block shipping.
The last time such a large ice island formed in Greenland was in 1962 when the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved an island.
Smaller pieces of that chunk became lodged between real islands inside Nares Strait.
In February, an iceberg the size of Luxembourg broke off in the Antarctic.

Huge ice island breaks from Greenland glacier - Telegraph

Where are the pics of the polar bears stranded on the ice chunk?
I hope our TD pal who works in Greenland is OK. Beggar. He's not posted for so long, I forgot his bladdy nik.

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

Where are the pics of the polar bears stranded on the ice chunk?
I hope our TD pal who works in Greenland is OK. Beggar. He's not posted for so long, I forgot his bladdy nik.

He'll probably turn up posting from mid Atlantic as soon as he runs into a usable wi fi connection

^ Nah, he was on the West side, same as that iceberg. Geez...Dar...D something. Name won't pop up.

Dalton?

Perhaps some of the nukes that the US Airforce lost up there will be in it.

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

...Dar...D something

Driftman?

that'll speed up the sinking and flooding of BKK in no time .

Originally Posted by withnallstoke

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

...Dar...D something

Driftman?

Ey up, Son!

The joys of a right click on a username, eh?

Glad to see you're alive ***mond.

Sorry to go off topic, but, i'll be out there permanently from the end of the year.

<pm me>

If this keeps on going Bangkok will be under water in a decade

At last, some neutral reporting that doesn't suggest it's the end of the world.

Originally Posted by StrontiumDog

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOT...src=eorss-iotd

Record Melting in Greenland during 2010

Posted February 18, 2011

acquired January 1, 2010 - December 31, 2010

2010 was an exceptional year for Greenland’s ice cap. Melting started early and stretched later in the year than usual. Little snow fell to replenish the losses. By the end of the season, much of southern Greenland had set a new record, with melting that lasted 50 days longer than average.

This image was assembled from microwave data from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) of the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program. Snow and ice emit microwaves, but the signal is different for wet, melting snow than for dry. Marco Tedesco, a professor at the City College of New York, uses this difference to chart the number of days that snow is melting every year. This image above shows 2010 compared to the average number of melt days per year between 1979 and 2009.

The long melt season primarily affected southern and western Greenland, where communities experienced their warmest year on record. After a warm, dry winter, temperatures were particularly high in the spring, getting the melt season off to a strong start. The early melting set the tone for the rest of the season, leading to more melting all the way into mid-September.

When snow melts, the fine, bright powder turns to larger-grained, gravely snow. These large grains reflect less light, which means that they can absorb more energy and melt even faster. When the annual snow is melted away, parts of the ice cap are exposed. The surface of the ice is also darker than snow. Since dark ice was exposed earlier and longer in 2010, it absorbed more energy, leading to a longer melt season. A fresh coat of summer snow would have protected the ice sheet, but little snow fell.

Melting ice in Greenland freshens the seas near the Arctic and contributes to rising sea levels around the world. It is unclear just how much melting ice from Greenland will push sea levels up, largely because the melting is occurring much more quickly than scientists predicted. Current estimates call for an increase of up to 0.6 meters by 2100.

To see how this melting looked on the surface of the ice sheet, see Tedesco’s photos and video on the City College of New York web site.

1. References
2. IPCC. (2007). Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [Core Writing Team, Pachauri, R.K and Reisinger, A. (eds.)]. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland, 104 pp.
3. Tedesco, M., Fettweis, X., van den Broeke, M.R., van de Wal, R.S.W., Smeets, C.J.P.P., van de Berg, W.J., Serreze, M.C., and Box, J.E. (2011, January 21). The role of albedo and accumulation in the 2010 melting record in Greenland. Environmental Research Letters, 6 (1).

NASA Earth Observatory image by Robert Simmon, based on data from Marco Tedesco, City College Of New York. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

Nice update, SD! Thanks.