Big Antarctic Ice Melt
Call me a freak, but I’ve always been fascinated by complex natural ice formations. I think I got my start on it as a child watching the frost form on the storm windows of my house. There’s just something cool about how ice freezes forming complex crystal lattice structures. Even today I marvel at the ice found in my home town, Buffalo NY, during the winter. Watching how the water travels and the shapes change during the spring thaw is far more interesting to me than the hope that things will warm up.
But that’s just me, I guess.
I was reminded of this while poking through CNN.com this morning. They have a cool story about the antarctic ice melt during 2005:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Vast areas of snow in Antarctica melted in 2005 when temperatures warmed up for a week in the summer in a process that may accelerate invisible melting deep beneath the surface, NASA said on Tuesday.
A new analysis of satellite data showed that an area the size of California melted and then re-froze — the most significant thawing in 30 years, the U.S. space agency said.
Unlike the Arctic, Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, where ice sheets have been breaking apart.
Son Nghiem of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado in Boulder measured snowfall accumulation and melt in Antarctica from July 1999 through July 2005.
They found evidence of melting in several areas, including high elevations and far inland in January of 2005, when temperatures got as high as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).
“Increases in snowmelt, such as this in 2005, definitely could have an impact on larger scale melting of Antarctica’s ice sheets if they were severe or sustained over time,” Steffen said in a statement.
“Water from melted snow can penetrate into ice sheets through cracks and narrow, tubular glacial shafts called moulins,” Steffen added.
“If sufficient melt water is available, it may reach the bottom of the ice sheet. This water can lubricate the underside of the ice sheet at the bedrock, causing the ice mass to move toward the ocean faster, increasing sea level.”
I’ve never really seen much on the structures that lie beneath the poles, but I can just imagine how amazing they must look. I haven’t taken any serious study of it, but doing a quick check on moulins on wikipedia is pretty cool. After all, it makes sense that a glacier would have some way of transporting the water formed on top by the sunlight and warm air to the structures underneath since it usually isn’t a cohesive solid block of ice. I guess you’d get a similar effect by dripping water on a regular block of ice…eventually it would melt downward into a hole in the bottom.
Hmmm…I’ll have to try that. 