from the new york times:
Filed at 9:31 p.m. ET
Ice Mass Snaps Free From Canada's Arctic
TORONTO (AP) -- A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada's Arctic, scientists said. The mass of ice broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 497 miles south of the North Pole, but no one was present to see it in Canada's remote north. Scientists using satellite images later noticed that it became a newly formed ice island in just an hour and left a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.
Warwick Vincent of Laval University, who studies Arctic conditions, traveled to the newly formed ice island and could not believe what he saw.
''This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are loosing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead,'' Vincent said Thursday.
In 10 years of working in the region he has never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, he said.
The collapse was so powerful that earthquake monitors 155 miles away picked up tremors from it.
The Ayles Ice Shelf, roughly 41 square miles in area, was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada's Arctic.
Scientists say it is the largest event of its kind in Canada in 30 years and point their fingers at climate change as a major contributing factor.
''It is consistent with climate change,'' Vincent said, adding that the remaining ice shelves are 90 percent smaller than when they were first discovered in 1906.
''We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role.''
…anyone seen ‘an inconvenient truth’?
2 comments:
Hmmm. We were in a "mini-Ice Age" a couple of hundred years ago. And the Middle Ages, by all accounts, were warmer than our current temps. Looking over the timespan you're examining, it would seem, is far too short to be helpful.
At least, that's what MIT's Richard Lindzen, the head of Atmospheric Studies says. But, what the hey, I'm sure Al Gore's panic-stricken diatribes carry more weight.
i agree with you entirely that the timespan of man's effect on climate change is a very controversial issue, but then so is mankind's influence on his environment. - go look at the australian barrier reef, or what's left of it.
"There's only one, teensy, weensy little problem with this pseudo-science." is a very unscientific statement. i'm sure if my girlfriend, who is finishing up on her doctoral thesis, put that anywhere in her paper, she would be told to remove it.
if you're going to criticise something. there are plenty of words to choose from that aren't aimed at a three-year old girl.
and as for your last smug comment, i'm sure that the huge chunk of ice that has just broken off from the arctic carries even more weight, and inertia.
i'm sorry, but you can't criticise something and leave your identity as 'anonymous'. at least i put a name to what i blog!
'anonymous' the same as having a biege wall...
you don't have any beige walls, do you?
peace
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