Jay Zally: The most important thing to know about the Earth’s ice sheets is that they are changing, that they are responding to climate change.
Dr. Jay Zwally is project scientist on NASA’s ICESat mission. Since 2003, ICESat has used lasers to precisely measure the thickness of ice near Earth’s poles. Zwally said that over the past decade Greenland’s ice sheet is losing more ice than it gains. It’s losing in excess of about 150 gigatons of ice every year.
Jay Zwally: One way to think about how much 150 gigatons is that if you had earth movers that carried 150 tons each, it would take 2,000 of them each minute to dump the excess ice into the ocean.
Dr. Zwally said average temperatures are rising faster at Greenland’s latitude than at middle latitudes on Earth. He also spoke of sea level rise.
Jay Zwally: The amount of sea level rise currently is about 3-4 millimeters per year. This adds up to about 16 inches at the present rate over the next hundred years. Even if there is no additional climate warming, sea level will continue at the same rate and rise about 16 inches over the next hundred years. But because of the changes that we’re seeing in Greenland, we know that this loss will increase, and that the sea level rise could be much larger than that.
The lasers that monitored ice thickness on ICESat stopped working in 2009. An airborne campaign called Operation ICE Bridge is currently bridging the gap in observations until the launch of the ICESat-II satellite in 2015.
Jay Zwally: The idea of the canary in the coal mine is that it’s a warning sign to get out of the coal mines when the gases build up. The things that are taking place on the Earth – the melting of the ice sheet in Greenland, the increase and the loss of sea ice in the Arctic ocean – these are warning signs of the same type.
Dr. Zwally described the ICESat mission in more detail.
Jay Zwally: ICESat is a satellite that was launched in 2003, and the primary purpose of this satellite was to study the ice sheet of Greenland and Antarctica, to find out whether they’re getting bigger or whether they’re getting smaller, and why. We needed to understand the impact of the ice sheets and the changes of these ice sheets in response to climate.
Dr. Zwally spoke more on why Greenland is losing more ice than it gains.
Jay Zwally: Temperatures have been getting warmer in Greenland. The warming in the Arctic, in Greenland and the Arctic Ocean and the sea ice areas is about two to three times the global average. The climate affects the ice sheet in several different ways. One is that the warmer air brings more snowfall over the ice sheet. Around the edges, the ice sheet is melting more. There are some places where the ice flows directly into the ocean and forms ice bergs. These ice bergs are accelerating. In addition, the warmer climate brings more snowfall to Greenland. And the warmer temperatures, the warmer water in the air both affect the melting at the edges. So it’s a race between growth in the center and loss at the edges. What’s happening in Greenland is that the loss processes are dominating the growth processes.
Our thanks today to NASA’s ICESat Mission, improving our understanding of the effects of Earth’s changing climate.
This is a serious issue for everyone live on the earth. but how to curb this problem, it remains a big question
so y is it a problem involving water? I have yet 2 believe global warming cause. sounds like we need to harvest water or learn how to handle water levels changes for earth needs; crops etc. instead of looking at a problem y not change how we look at the water shortage. take all that billions of dollars from global warming and gather our water sources while it is “melting” and use it, instead of watching it melt in ocean, creating billions of jobs
During the latter days of WWII aomw fighters and bombers were being flown to Europe from the US. Fuel was misculacted and it had to set down in Greenland ice shelf. The airplanes were forgotten for about 40 years until someone checked the records and found that it made an emergency landing in a Greenland ice shelf. THEY WERE FINALLY LOCATED UNDER 240 FEET OF ICE AND SNOW!
Is that the story of “The Lost Squadron,”:http://creation.com/the-lost-squadron by Carl Wieland, that you refer to, A.P.?
So let’s see … 250′ of ice covered the airplanes … and this guy predicts that we’ll lose less than 1.5′ of ice over the next 100 years … I don’t think I’ll worry about it much.
LoboSolo says:
February 23, 2010 at 6:05 pm
>>> So let’s see … 250? of ice covered the airplanes
By this logic, every toilet in the world is perpetually clogged. If the planes were covered by 250′ of ice and snow, and the overall level of the top of the ice is falling, it means that more than two hundred and fifty feet of ice had disappeared out from under the planes, which was partially replaced by new deposits.
This may be happening too slowly for some people to understand, but the Greenland icecap, and other ice sheets and glaciers around the world, are being flushed slowly down the toilet and flowing out to sea.
Give it up, Zwally. The only thing that’s seriously melting around here is the credibility of the “scientists” who led the warmenista fraud…Does Climategate mean nothing to you? The folks at East Anglia have thrown in the towel, there are serious problems with the NASA and NOAA data, the Himalayan glaciers aren’t vanishing, the polar bears are becoming more numerous, and the temperature records are finally being revealed to be flat or declining. There really was a Medieval Warming period…imagine that. Man made climate change is a monstrous load of tripe, that was being used as a vehicle to persuade the non-scientific public to give up their rights and their hard-earned comforts.
Am I a scientist? No, thank God. I’m an engineer. I deal in reality.
Wake up and smell the hubris, Zwally. It’s yours.
I’m sure we can discuss the science, ice sheets, Greenland, climate change, without resorting to personal attacks.
If you’d like to dig deeper into the research of ICESat, NASA has a good news story about “dramatic” sea ice loss in the Arctic between 2004-2008, http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/icesat-20090707.html .
Dr. Z, with tons of weight released from the land surface, the amount of pressure exerted on the surface will also decrease. Because of this, is it probable to think that earthquakes and tremors be more prevalent sometime in the near future? Also, with more and more fresh water mixing with the ocean making it less dense due to loss of salinity, what do you think the ramifications are affecting the natural process currently taking place in the ocean?
Is unlikely to have much effect on earthquakes, except perhaps locally near the ice sheets. Change in salinity could change the ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which could have feedback on climate. That is being studied, but is very difficult to predict.
Jay Z
Scientists and engineers have studied feasibility of towing icebergs from Antarctic of somehow harvesting the fresh water in the ice sheets. Result is it is not practical to do that.
One of the major impacts of climate warming will be its effect on water resources, wetter in some places, but drier in other places like perhaps in grasslands Arizona (one of the reason Sen. McCain worked on climate legislation. Competition for water resources in dry areas like the Middle East may be a source of future conflicts.
Dear Dr Jay-Z,
If I read you correctly, you said “Gigatons annually”? Ok, Im no climate expert, but I am interested oceanic temperatures in the Atlantic especially off the coast of West Africa and the Caribbean Sea. Does or can all this cold fresh water affect the surface temperature of the bodies of water I mentioned above. Also could this mean a less active hurricane season in the summer months and a collection of more moisture in the Gulf of Mexico… where most Nor’easters stem from? Also how does increased atmospheric temps in the arctic affect barrometric pressures and the jet stream? And can this cause a plunge of cold air as far south as say Florida?(frozen oranges are good ^_^). Cold air in place plus more than normal moisture = record snowfalls along the east coast?
Please reply,
Christopher
@Doug in Colorado:
Are u saying u don’t believe in GW or that it is not caused by adding greenhouse gases due to industrial processes? It’s not clear from your post. You say the guys at East Anglia have thrown in the towel. By which you mean they have conceded that they invented the whole GW thing? Can u reference that? NASA data, ditto. Temperature records flat or declining? Ditto.
If GW is happening but is not caused by Man, doesn’t that still mean that there will be consequences as the Earth adapts, and isn’t it rational that a technological, predictive species like ours considers how best to alleviate those effects, if possible. Regardless, shouldn’t we use resources more efficiently?
[...] Jay Zwally warns Greenland ice loss is canary in coal mine | EarthSky [...]
Very interesting and informative post
Global warming is taking its toll on the antarctic ice and sooner or later we are gonna pay for this.
all the information i got from this site is very interesting,I would like to thanks for sharing this information….!
Mountain glaciers are shrinking three times faster than they were in the 1980s, scientists have announced. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, which continuously studies a sample of 30 glaciers around the world, says the acceleration is due to climate change. They continuously study a set of 30 mountain glaciers in different parts of the world. http://paintzoomfacts.com
Doug,
Sorry the facts have you so upset. Reality is that climate is warming due to man-produced greenhouse gases. Even famous “skeptics” like Pat Michaels agree with that (see his book Meltdown), but differ on details and what to do about it.
Jay
Hi Doug in Colorado.
Replied to ur post by adding a new msg at 2.00 pm on 02-27-2010 before I saw reply buttons.
Rate of ice loss average over Greenland is now 12 cm/yr or 1.2 m (4 ft) in 100 yrs. Some places near the edges where some of the planes crashed it is losing 10 m or more per yr. Those rates will increase with climate warming. Yes, there is enough ice there to last a long time, so don\’t worry about that. And if u do not live near coast, don\’t worry about sea level either unless you care about impact of sea level rise on others and the world economy.