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Lakes beneath Antarctic ice sheets found to initiate and sustain flow of ice to ocean
Clare Oh, Columbia Univaersity
One of the planet’s most remote and little-understood features may play a crucial role in transporting ice from the remote interior of Antarctica towards the surrounding ocean according to a new research.
Geophysicists Robin Bell and Michael Studinger from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a part of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, led a team that discovered four large, subglaical lakes that for the first time the link these water bodies locked beneath miles of ice, to fast flowing ice streams in Antarctica. Together with colleagues from NASA, the University of New Hampshire and the University of Washington, the scientists found that, in four separate cases, lakes appear to contribute to the formation of ice streams. Their work appears in the February 22 issue of the journal Nature. ..
“It’s almost as if the lakes are capturing the geothermal energy from the entire basin and releasing it to the ice stream.” said Bell. “They power the engines that drive ice sheet collapse. The more we learn about them, the more we realize how important they are.”
(21 Feb 2007)
See also Scientists sound alarm over melting Antarctic ice sheets from The Independent (UK):
..Glaciologists have known for some time that water exists under the Antarctic ice sheets – which can be hundreds of metres thick – but they were surprised to find how much water is involved and the speed at which it moves from one subglacial reservoir to another, said Helen Fricker at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
“We didn’t realise that the water under these ice streams was moving in such large quantities, and on such short time scales. We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months. The detected motions are astonishing in magnitude, dynamic nature and spatial extent,” Dr Fricker said. ..
Great ForestsHold Fateful Role in Climate Change
Doug Struck, Washington Post
PINE FALLS, Manitoba — Here on the edge of the silent and frozen northern tier of the Earth, the fate of the world’s climate is buried beneath the snow and locked in the still limbs of aspen trees.
Nearly half of the carbon that exists on land is contained in the sweeping boreal forests, which gird the Earth in the northern reaches of Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia and Russia. Scientists now fear that the steady rise in the temperature of the atmosphere and the increasing human activity in those lands are releasing that carbon, a process that could trigger a vicious cycle of even more warming.
The prospect of the land itself accelerating climate change staggers scientists, as well as woodsmen such as Bob Austman, who stopped recently in a quiet stand of birch on the edge of the boreal forest to examine a jack rabbit’s tracks.
“There are big forces out there,” he said succinctly.
Those forces, which scientists are only starting to understand, could free vast stores of carbon and methane that have been collecting since the last ice age in the frozen tundra and northern forests. Their release would push the world’s climate toward a heat spiral that would raise ocean levels, spawn fierce storms and scorch farmlands, scientists believe.
But the land is impartial. It could also be enlisted to help abate global warming, as both a storehouse for man-made carbon dioxide and a natural sponge for greenhouse gases.
(22 Feb 2007)
Carbon offsets ‘harm environment’
BBC
The current trend for “offsetting” carbon emissions by planting trees is doing more harm to the environment than good, MPs have been told.
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The public is being “seriously misled” by companies peddling carbon offset schemes, campaigner Jutta Kill told the environmental audit committee. The schemes did not reduce emissions and simply gave industry a “licence to pollute” elsewhere, she argued. People should give money directly to climate charities instead, she said. ..
Jutta Kill, of the Forests and the European Union Resource Network (FERN), was the most vehement opponent of the practice, arguing it probably did more harm than good.
Carbon offsetting was “an unbelievably inefficient way of reducing emissions,” she argued, and its effects were impossible to verify. In addition, “More than half” of the money given to companies selling carbon offsets went on research and administration costs, “benefiting not the climate but the burgeoning consultancy industry”. ..
(20 Feb 2007)
Its hard to argue that Carbon Offsets have NO beneficial impacts, but ‘neutralise’ the impact of humans? As if! Congratulations to FERN for persisting and getting heard in parliamentary committee, and to the BBC for finally carrying a story the New Internationalist nailed a few years ago. -LJ
