ON THE NEW ISLANDS OF GREENLAND

WARMING SIGNS

The beautiful but unsettling picture below is from an article titled "The Warming of Greenland" in the New York Times Science section.  It represents the recently discovered and provisionally named island of "Uunartoq Qeqertoq", which means "The Warming Island".  As the Times piece explains:

"Mr. (Dennis) Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orleans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice."

The reason the article is unsettling is that the island represents a small piece of a broader, seemingly accelerating trend.  As the piece continues:

"The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.

Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.

That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps, Dr. Boggild said.  €œIf you lose that much volume you'd definitely see new islands appear."

And here's the punchline:

"The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime “glacial earthquakes” have been detected within the ice sheet.

€œThe general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don'€™t react very quickly to climate, said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.  But that thinking is changing right now, because we're seeing things that people have thought are impossible."

Apparently, the computer models don't seem to account for what's happening in real life.

It's an article that certainly makes one sit up and take notice.  I'm certainly no expert on global climate change, and realize that anecdotal data do not necessarily make a long-term trend.

Anyone have any insights as why this shouldn't be read as an alarming piece?

Comments

[Tisha]

Unfortunately I do not know enough on the topic myself however I have read on a number of occasions that "Global Warming" is a hoax - these days I don't know who to believe!

[Alex Tolley]

I believe that what has been happening is that surface meltwater has not refrozen, but rather cut down through the glacier to its base, lubricating the ice-rock interface and increasing the rate of flow into the ocean. Computer models had not taken this new observation into account, and will probably not until the phenomenon is better understood.

Should this be of concern - yes. This phenomenon couldl increase the rate of destruction of the glaciers, both in Greenland and Antarctica. If the feedback loops are +ve, then the deline of the ice sheets and the rise of sea level will occur that much earlier.

On a related note, see this point about the possible sudden decline in arctic sea ice in mid-century.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/01/arctic-sea-ice-decline-in-the-21st-century/

[Jebster]

In a book written in the early 20th century, called "Arctic Riviera", there is a map with this island clearly delineated. Explain that gulible warming nuts.