Greenland Ice Cap

It is doom and gloom for all of us according to the scientists. The ice cap in Greenland has melted 97% unprecedently or is it as predicted. The ice cap melts every 150 years, last time was in 1889. The rest is unknown.

For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations. Nearly the entire ice cover of Greenland, from its thin, low-lying coastal edges to its two-mile-thick center, experienced some degree of melting at its surface, according to measurements from three independent satellites analyzed by NASA and university scientists.

On average in the summer, about half of the surface of Greenland's ice sheet naturally melts. At high elevations, most of that melt water quickly refreezes in place. Near the coast, some of the melt water is retained by the ice sheet and the rest is lost to the ocean. But this year the extent of ice melting at or near the surface jumped dramatically. According to satellite data, an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface thawed at some point in mid-July.



 

This I got from Nasa website.  To understand about Greenland and it's ice cap i went to wikipedia. Nice reading for a person who lives on higher ground. But for people who live in the areas near the sea it is a very tense situation. The numbers wiki gives about the amount of water stored in the ice cap is not something to laugh at. The people who laughed at climatic scientists will have to sink their heads in shame. wiki says this. but the data is not upto data, as the information above came out yesterday.

Positioned in the Arctic, the Greenland ice sheet is especially vulnerable to climate change. Arctic climate is now rapidly warming and much larger Arctic shrinkage changes are projected. The Greenland Ice Sheet has experienced record melting in recent years and is likely to contribute substantially to sea level rise as well as to possible changes in ocean circulation in the future. The area of the sheet that experiences melting has increased about 16% from 1979 (when measurements started) to 2002 (most recent data). The area of melting in 2002 broke all previous records. The number of glacial earthquakes at the Helheim Glacier and the northwest Greenland glaciers increased substantially between 1993 and 2005. In 2006, estimated monthly changes in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet suggest that it is melting at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometers (57 cu mi) per year. A more recent study, based on reprocessed and improved data between 2003 and 2008, reports an average trend of 195 cubic kilometers (47 cu mi) per year.These measurements came from the US space agency's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite, launched in 2002, as reported by BBC. Using data from two ground-observing satellites, ICESAT and ASTER, a study published in Geophysical Research Letters (September 2008) shows that nearly 75 percent of the loss of Greenland's ice can be traced back to small coastal glaciers.

Please go here to read the rest.

THen I came across an article written some time ago (as I could not find the date of URL: reader's project; find the date please and comment ta), and the article is not very informative but the comment is just ha ha ha. Here it is.

Craig Dillon 4 months ago

The big problem is that we don't really know the processes involved in the melting of such a large ice sheets. If it was just a big block of ice, we could just calculate how long it would take considering different projections of air temperature. But that is NOT the case. Ice sheets are under geologic stresses that make them fracture and flow. Already atmospheric CO2 is at a level not seen since the pliocene, much higher than it was during the Eemian period. Within this century, we will have achieved CO2 levels not seen since the Cretaceous. Greenland will NOT melt in isolation. Antarctica will also melt to some degree.
If we could be confident that it would take 20,000 years to achieve sea level rises of 20 to 80 feet, then we could be complacent about the future. The process would be so slow that cities could easily creep inland as oceans slowly rose.
From what we are seeing now, that does not seem likely. Don't paleoclimate studies show that climate changes have occurred in remarkable short periods? Don't current observations indicate large and growing methane emissions from Arctic Ocean clathrates, which has not happened since the Eocene?

In my lifetime, I have seen Lake Michigan become 10 degrees fahrenheit warmer.
Your optimism is charming, but does not consider significant and profound factors. Considering you are a paleoclimatologist, I can only wonder how much you are receiving from the Cato, Heartland, or other Koch backed institutes to write such a puff piece.

Something in this blogging website is not working. I could not get the bloody "quote" function to work. Since Google took over this lark it has more functions but hilariously But, anyhow, here is the link to the above .
We all believe in what the boffins say. Here is first few paragraphs from,what they said last august.

The entire ice mass of Greenland will disappear from the world map if temperatures rise by as little as 2C, with severe consequences for the rest of the world, a panel of scientists told Congress today.

Greenland shed its largest chunk of ice in nearly half a century last week, and faces an even grimmer future, according to Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University
"Sometime in the next decade we may pass that tipping point which would put us warmer than temperatures that Greenland can survive," Alley told a briefing in Congress, adding that a rise in the range of 2C to 7C would mean the obliteration of Greenland's ice sheet.

The fall-out would be felt thousands of miles away from the Arctic, unleashing a global sea level rise of 23ft (7 metres), Alley warned. Low-lying cities such as New Orleans would vanish.

Bloody awful init? Now read the rest if you want to get more depressed. Here I can give you a website with facts etc.