Greenland update for 2010: record melting and a massive calving event
No humans were present on the morning of August 4, 2010, in a remote fjord in Northwest Greenland, when the air vibrated with a thunderous crack as one of the largest icebergs in world history calved from the Petermann Glacier, the island's second largest ocean-terminating glacier. Where the glacier meets the sea, a 43 mile-long tongue of floating ice existed at the beginning of 2010. On August 4 2010, a quarter of this 43 mile-long tongue of floating ice fractured off, spawning a 100 square mile ice island four times the size of Manhattan, with a thickness half that of the Empire State building. According to Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, the freshwater stored in this ice island could have kept the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years, or kept all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days. There was speculation that the ice island could find its way into the open Atlantic Ocean in two years, and potentially pose a threat to oil platforms and ships. However, as the ice island made its turn to get from the narrow Petermann Fjord to enter Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada, the mighty iceberg split into thousands of small icebergs that will not pose an unusual threat to shipping when they emerge into the Atlantic.
Figure 1. The 100 square-mile ice island that broke off the Petermann Glacier heads out of the Petermann Fjord in this image taken by NASA's Aqua satellite on August 21, 2010. Image credit: NASA. I've constructed a 7-frame satellite animation available here that shows the calving and break-up of the Petermann Glacier ice island. The animation begins on August 5, 2010, and ends on September 21, with images spaced about 8 days apart. The images were taken by NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.
Petermann Glacier spawned smaller ice islands in 2001 (34 square miles) and in 2008 (10 square miles). In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf, about 60 miles to the west of Petermann Glacier, disintegrated and became a 34 square-mile ice island. The August 2010 Petermann Glacier calving event created the largest iceberg observed in the Arctic since 1962, when the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on the north coast of Canada's Ellesmere Island calved off a massive 230 square mile chunk. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf also calved off a huge 21 square mile ice island a few days after the August 2010 Petermann Glacier calving event. According to an article in livescience.com, "Driftwood and narwhal remains found along the Ellesmere coast have radiocarbon dates from roughly 3,000 to 6,800 years ago, implying that the ice has been intact since those remains were deposited." All of the these calving events are evidence that the ice sheets in the Arctic are responding as one would expect to significantly warmer temperatures.
Warmer ocean temperatures cause significant melting of Greenland's glaciers
At a talk last December at the world's largest conference on climate change, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, glacier expert Eric Rignot of UC-Irvine implicated ocean warming as a key reason for the calving of the Petermann Glacier's ice island. The ocean waters near the glacier have warmed by 1 - 2°C over the past three years, he said, and all of the periphery of Greenland has seen ocean heat increases in recent years, with the result that 20 - 80% of all the mass lost by Greenland's glaciers in recent years could be attributed to melting of the glaciers by warmer waters attacking them from beneath. Ocean temperatures along the southwest coast of Greenland (60N to 70N, 60W to 50W) computed from the UK Hadley Center data set during 2010 were 2.9°C (5.2°F) above average--a truly remarkable anomaly, and far warmer than the previous record of 1.5°C above average set in 2003. Sea surface temperature records for Greenland began in the 1920s. A study earlier this year published in the journal Science (Spielhagen et al., 2011) found that ocean temperatures on the east side of Greenland are now at their warmest levels in at least 2,000 years. The researchers studied a sediment core containing fossil remains of planktic foraminifers, which vary as a function of water temperature. The study noted that not only have the waters flowing northward on the east side of Greenland warmed significantly, the volume of water flowing north has also increased, resulting in a large transport of heat into the Arctic. "Such an increased heat input has far-reaching consequences," they wrote.
Figure 2. Departure of sea surface temperature from average for 2010 from the NOAA Daily Optimum Interpolation SST Anomaly data set for October 2010. Areas colored red are warmer than the 1971-2000 average, areas colored blue are cooler than that average. A large region of record warm water temperatures extended along the west coast of Greenland, leading to record warm air temperatures and record melting along the western portion of Greenland in 2010. Ocean temperatures along the southwest coast of Greenland (60N to 70N, 60W to 50W) computed from the UK Hadley Center data set during 2010 were 2.9°C (5.2°F) above average--a truly remarkable anomaly, surpassing the previous record of 1.5°C set in 2003. Sea surface temperature records for Greenland began in the 1920s. Image credit: NOAA Visualization Lab.
Record warmth and melting in Greenland during 2010
Greenland's climate in 2010 was marked by record-setting high air temperatures, the greatest ice loss by melting since accurate records began in 1958, and the greatest mass loss of ocean-terminating glaciers on record. That was the conclusion of the 2010 Arctic Report Card, a collaborative effort between NOAA and European Arctic experts that comes out each year. Was 2010 the warmest year in Greenland's history? That is difficult to judge. We know it was also very warm in the late 1920s and 1930s in Greenland, but we only have two stations, Godtahab Nuuk and Angmagssalik, with weather records that go back that far (Figure 3.) Godtahab Nuuk set a record high in 2010, but temperatures at Angmagssalik in 2010 were similar to what was observed during several years in the 1920s and 1930s. Marco Tedesco of the City College of New York's Cryosphere Processes Laboratory remarked that last year's record warmth and melting in Greenland began when an unusually early spring warm spell reduced and "aged" the snow on the surface of the ice sheet, so that the snow became less reflective, allowing it to absorb more heat from the sun. This accelerated snow melt even further, exposing the bare ice, which is less reflective than snow and absorbs more heat. This feedback loop extended Greenland's record melting season well into the fall.
Figure 3. Historic temperatures in Greenland for the six stations with at least 50 years of data, as archived by NASA. Three of the six stations set record highs in 2010. However, only two of the six stations (Godtahab Nuuk and Angmagssalik) have data going back beyond the 1930s, which was a period of warmth in Greenland similar to the warmth of the current decade. Godtahab Nuuk set a record high in 2010, but 2003 still ranks as Angmagssalik's hottest year on record.
Figure 4. The 2010 summer melt season was lasted more than 40 days longer (purple colors) than the mean melt season from 1979 - 2007. Image credit: Arctic Report Card.
Why Greenland matters: sea level rise
The major concern with a warming climate in Greenland is melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which currently contributes about 25% of the observed 3 mm/year (1.2 inches per decade) global rise in sea level. Higher sea levels mean increased storm surge inundation, coastal erosion, loss of low-lying land areas, and salt water contamination of underground drinking water supplies. Greenland ice mass loss is accelerating over the long term, according to independent estimates using three different techniques (Figure 5), with more mass being lost each year than the previous year. According to Rignot et al., 2011, ice mass loss is also accelerating in Antarctica, and "the magnitude of the acceleration suggests that ice sheets will be the dominant contributors to sea level rise in forthcoming decades, and will likely exceed the IPCC projections for the contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise in the 21st century." As I discussed in a 2009 blog post, How much will global sea level rise this century?, the IPCC in 2007 estimated that global sea level would rise 0.6 - 1.9 feet by 2100, but several studies since then predict a higher range of 1.6 - 6.6 feet.
During the warm period 125,000 years ago, before the most recent ice age, roughly half of the Greenland ice sheet melted. This melting plus the melting of other smaller Arctic ice fields is thought to have caused 7.2 - 11.2 feet (2.2 - 3.4 meters) of the 13 - 20 foot (4 - 6 meter) sea level rise observed during that period. Temperatures in Greenland are predicted to rise 3°C by 2100, to levels similar to 125,000 years ago. If this level of warming occurs, we can expect sea levels to rise 13 - 20 feet several centuries from now. There's enough water locked away in the ice sheet to raise sea level to rise 23 feet (7 meters), should the entire Greenland ice sheet melt.
Figure 5. Loss of mass from Greenland's ice sheet in gigatons per year from 1992 through 2009, as computed from satellite gravity measurements from the GRACE satellites (red line) and from a mass balance method. The mass balance method computes the amount of snow on the surface, the amount of ice mass lost to wind and melt, and the amount of ice lost computed from glacier velocity and ice thickness. Adding together these terms gives the total amount of ice lost or gained over the ice sheet. The acceleration is given in gigatons per year squared. Another paper by Zwally et al. (2011) used a third method, laser satellite altimetry, to determine Greenland mass loss. Between 2003 to 2007, the ice sheet lost 171 gigatons of mass per year. Between 1992 to 2002, Greenland was only losing only 7 gigatons per year. Image credit: Rignot et al., 2011, Geophysical Research Letters.
References
Rignot, E., et al., 2011: Acceleration of the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, in press, doi:10.1029/2011GL046583.
Spielhagen, et al., 2011, Enhanced Modern Heat Transfer to the Arctic by Warm Atlantic Water, Science 28 January 2011: Vol. 331 no. 6016 pp. 450-453 DOI: 10.1126/science.1197397
Zwally, J., et al., 2011, Greenland ice sheet mass balance: distribution of increased mass loss with climate warming; 2003 - 07 versus 19922 - 2002, Journal of Glaciology, Vol. 57, No. 201, 2011.
Wunderground's climate change section has a Greenland web page with detailed information and references.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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How high is it?
Prevention and reversal aren't the current mantra, at least in the scientific circles.
Prevention/reversal hasn't been realistic for some time, and most climate scientist would tell you so. Most are advocating preparation at this point. The fringes and environuts are still stuck on the prevention-reversal kick, but we simply don't have the technology to deal with that, let alone the universal support of world nations to undertake such a task if we did.
Sure, ideas have been put forward like giant sails in space and such, but nothing has been researched enough to show that such methods wouldn't have unintended consequences. Also, a number of proposed methods are just patches over the problem. They address the symptom and not the cause.
It's a deep-layer high at all levels.
High as a kite.
The poles are predicted to warm faster (especially in the norther hemisphere), but there will still be plenty of difference between the poles and the tropics.
I'm not an expert on hurricane genesis, but I would think the bigger wet towel on cyclone formation would be a thicker troposphere with a slower vertical temperature gradient as a result of warmer global temperatures. It would take more work for storms to get going in such circumstances, but if a storm did get going it would be a monster.
I think that some of the AR4 runs also showed an increase in shear over the Atlantic as warming progressed as well, which would be another inhibitor.
At any rate, the AR5 runs should offer more insight.
Numerous studies in recent years have found no evidence that the number of hurricanes and their northwest Pacific Ocean cousins, typhoons, is increasing because of the rise in global temperatures.
But a new study in the journal Nature found that hurricanes and typhoons have become stronger and longer-lasting over the past 30 years. These upswings correlate with a rise in sea surface temperatures.
The duration and strength of hurricanes have increased by about 50 percent over the last three decades, according to study author Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Emanuel's finding defies existing models for measuring storm strength. Current models suggest that the intensity of hurricanes and typhoons should increase by 5 percent for every 1ºC (1.8ºF) rise in sea surface temperature
Link
AND
The latest understanding of hurricanes is that almost the opposite is true: storms may actually decline in frequency as the planet warms, even as they grow in strength.
Link
Of course there will still be difference. I said less, and less means less need for tropical cyclones.
A thicker troposphere does not inhibit tropical convection. The troposphere expands naturally with warmth which is why it is highest in the tropics in the first place. The only way the temperature gradient will become significantly slower is if the troposphere expands without warming the surface, which doesn't happen.
No. Don't give me the scientific law speech. Until there is no debate, it's not proven. You don't see people still arguing over whether gravity exists.
Second, you have done no calculations, at least until you show them. They are non-existent otherwise.
I'm not sure how melting sea ice increases vertical wind shear, you'll have to explain that one. Global ACE is at a 30-year low and the number of global major hurricanes has not increased significantly since satellite monitoring began.
This is the journal site? Did ya bother to look at anything else there aside from the self professed "peer reviewed" part. LOL
http://journalofcosmology.com/
Thank you WUWT for showing us the reality inside the hype once again. Interesting links abound in this write up, and well deserved Props to the creator :)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/skeptical-s cience-meteorite-aliens-bring-out-the-armchair-exp erts/#more-35369
Just a note on CO2 etc. production:-
At grass roots level people need to keep warm in cold places where most of us live and experience winters, so they burn wood, coal, old tires in oil drums, foam backed carpets and even wire from street lights to salvage the copper to sell to survive. Some of then have the cash to pay for gas and electricity but a lot don't.
They put petrol in badly adjusted car diesel tanks to get them through the emission tests at their annual inspections, they burn off large amounts of vegetable waste and tree clippings especially here in southern Europe where there are millions of olive trees, grown on desert like plowed fields.
When you consider the 3rd world then things are worse than here and the state of any climate awareness is very low, survival is the priority, usually at any cost.
Its not only the fossil fuel burners of the world who are part of the statistics there are a lot of other human factors out there!!
WPAC ACE has no trend either. One would expect an increase if typhoons were becoming "stronger and longer lasting."
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
Thanks for the link. From the article:
As of 2008 the catastrophe had cost Indonesia $3.7 billion dollars—nearly one percent of its GDP—according to an International Monetary Fund estimate.
Explain "more widespread variances." The greenhouse effect reduces temperature variance within the Earth system.
And no, tropical cyclones should not necessarily be getting stronger and longer-lasting. While they have more fuel available, the need for them is less. The temperature imbalance of the Earth has been decreasing during the last 30 years as it has warmed, which is the natural course of things. This also reduces extreme weather in general (less baroclinicity).
^Northern hemisphere only^
The WUWT write-up (coincidentally by one of the larger
denialistsskeptics"unconvinced"--surprise!) talks primarily of the Fox "breaking news" piece, which I haven't read. (I picked up the piece on meteorobs.) I suppose it's possible there are some actual news outfits (that is, as opposed to Fox) that picked up the story and ran with it as gospel, but most of the coverage I've seen has been moderate to highly skeptical.Dr. Maue's OT rant digs about UCS or WWF greatly diminish any lingering respect some may have had for him, but I do wish to thank him for pointing out the non-news nature of Fox--but that's a digression the blog doesn't need this evening, so I'll take in no further... ;-)
Somebody pressed Levi's on button.
Oh. What...the increase is hidden? I think ACE data speaks pretty clear for itself.
The amount of CO2 pumped into the environment by the U.S. greatly dwarfs that relatively small amount that comes from third world countries.
The sad truth is, those of us releasing the most CO2 are screwing over those least responsible. From today's headlines:
"Climate change will have the greatest effect on those least responsible for causing the problem, a new study suggests. Researchers at McGill University found what many have long-suspected -- countries that produce the least greenhouse gases per-capita also tend to be the most vulnerable to climate change.
"Based on our ecological models, we see that the potential impact of climate change will be the greatest in countries that have contributed very little," lead researcher and PhD candidate Jason Samson said in an interview.
"Similar models have been used to study how plants and animals respond to climate change, but Samson applied the tools to study the impact on humans."
Article...
I think you can handle uploading screenshots to tinypic or imageshack.
So let's see,,,, you completely avoid the obvious questionable nature of what you boasted as undeniably quality stuff, and attacked everything and everyone around the subject, but no response to the question on the subject legitimacy or documented history. That is very reminiscent of some other posters here. How does that make you feel, good, great, or guilty again ? Think about it......
I think that what they are saying is that we should expect fewer hurricanes but if they do develop, then, they would be stronger. but that doesn't means that the final total ACE for that year, will be higher.
Looks like that's what the graph is showing...
Correct me if wrong... ;)
That is what the consensus is, yes.
Quoting would be nice. Half the time I have no idea what you're talking about.
Lol, nice avoidance. Get off the blog then and study. Your calculations still don't exist until you show them. You can do that another time, although none of us will remember to ask you.
It also requires no account to upload on tinypic and takes a few seconds to upload something. No pressure.
Ok, that wasn't very hard right. Thanks. I will not bother asking for data, but I will just point out that it is only the Atlantic, which has been on the uptick in the AMO since the mid-1980s.
Some take issue with the Emanuel paper due to "adjusting for time-dependent biases due to changes in measurement and reporting practices".
Section 3 in this link
Thanks for the PDF...
Opposite of what is true? Both Levi and I were agreeing. Warmer global temperatures would ultimately result in fewer storms, but those storms would be stronger.
My only quibble was that it would seem that the warmer temps through the troposphere in the tropics would have more to do with with hurricane formation than the gradient between the arctic and the tropics (of course, that is important too). However, I'm not an expert on hurricane formation, hence the speculation on the cause.
Yeah, the Earth is warming, energy is released from ice. It kind of proves nothing. It is the cause that is debated, not the weather that is happening around us.
Authors: Robert Ehrlich (Submitted on 17 Feb 2010)
Abstract: Evidence is provided that the global distribution of tropical hurricanes is principally determined by a universal function H of a single variable z that in turn is expressible in terms of the local sea surface temperature and latitude. The data-driven model presented here carries stark implications for the large increased numbers of hurricanes which it predicts for a warmer world. Moreover, the rise in recent decades in the numbers of hurricanes in the Atlantic, but not the Pacific basin, is shown to have a simple explanation in terms of the specific form of H(z), which yields larger percentage increases when a fixed increase in sea surface temperature occurs at higher latitudes and lower temperatures.
Link
Horizontal temperature gradients matter because without them the atmosphere would not undergo large-scale vertical overturning in cells, which it does, precisely because the equator is warmest.
Well, I think you both agree with the data and studies presented here...
Well wouldn't it be if there was a suppression effect in place?
Why would ACE increase if there was a suppression effect.
Ive haven't seen a hurricane go to the arctic and poop out because it was too warm up there yet.
We're talking global here. The Hadley circulation is slowed when it is not as cold to the north. The only reason air rises at the equator (and thus forms tropical cyclones) is because it is warm there relative to everywhere else.
WEHW42 PHEB 070022
TIBHWX
HIZ001>003-005>009-012>014-016>021-023>026-070222 -
TSUNAMI INFORMATION STATEMENT NUMBER 1
NWS PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER EWA BEACH HI
222 PM HST SUN MAR 06 2011
TO - CIVIL DEFENSE IN THE STATE OF HAWAII
SUBJECT - TSUNAMI INFORMATION STATEMENT
THIS STATEMENT IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. NO ACTION REQUIRED.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 0210 PM HST 06 MAR 2011
COORDINATES - 10.3 SOUTH 160.9 EAST
LOCATION - SOLOMON ISLANDS
MAGNITUDE - 6.6 MOMENT
EVALUATION
BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA A DESTRUCTIVE PACIFIC-WIDE TSUNAMI IS
NOT EXPECTED AND THERE IS NO TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII. REPEAT. A
DESTRUCTIVE PACIFIC-WIDE TSUNAMI IS NOT EXPECTED AND THERE IS NO
TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY STATEMENT ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL DATA ARE RECEIVED.
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