Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Friday, August 1, 2008
It was fairly un-nerving when, a chunk of ice broke loose from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf off the coast of Ellesmere Island recently, but it had to have been somewhat expected.
The Ward Hunt is near the most northerly point in North America. Located in quttinirpaaq National Park it is the largest of five remnants of a much larger ice shelf discovered by Admiral Peary in 1906.
More than 6 years ago Derek Mueller, then at Universite Laval, Quebec, found the biggest ice shelf in the Arctic was indeed breaking apart.
Canadian RADARSAT images acquired in August 2002 showed a huge crack running North-south down the center of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf. Secondary fractures running west had fragmented a large area of the shelf into free-floating ice blocks.
At that time the shelf was home to a fresh water lake. These fresh water lakes are known as ehishelf lakes. That fracturing caused the immediate and catastrophic drainage of an ehishelf lake that had called the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf home. Ehishelf lakes are an important link in the ecology chain. This fresh water ‘floats’ on the more dense ocean water. Located in Disraeli Fjord this was the largest and best-understood epishelf lake in the Northern Hemisphere.
The epishelf lake suddenly spilled more than 3 billion cubic meters of fresh water into the Arctic Ocean.
Ice-dependant ecosystems are made vulnerable by the shifting climate. Microbial communities of algae, micro-invertebrates, and bacteria that could withstand near-freezing water temperatures, freezing and thawing cycles and organisms that used pigment changes to withstand ultraviolet radiation were suddenly and forever lost in that 2000-2002 crack-up and with them much information, and probably many untold secrets.
This most recent chunk of ice to separate from the Ward Hunt is 18 square kilometers across.
The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is estimated to be around 3,000 years old. Ice core climate data and lake sediments indicate the ‘Little Ice Age’ ended about 150 years ago and the climate has been warming since then. Only about 10% of the original ice shelf may be remaining.
They say the precise triggering mechanism for these fractures isn’t known. Although temperature records from Alert which is 175 km east of the Ward Hunt Ice shelf show a significant increase in the annual mean air temperatures during the last 30 years which parallel the thinning and loss of the epishelf lake.
Derek Mueller, now a Trent University researcher says, “We’re in a different climate now.” “It’s not conducive to regrowing them.” [ice sheets] “It’s a one-way process.
In 2003 Mueller wrote of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, “…one thing seems clear: it and the other Ellesmere ice shelves are sentinels of high Arctic environmental change…”
Photo Thanks #2 NASA
#1 Canadian Space Agency
Labels: Arctic, Arctic Ice, Canada, Climate Change, Global Warming, North Pole, Quttinirpaaq National Park, Sea Ice, Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, ehishelf lakes
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Sentinels of the high Arctic are disappearing from their posts.
Friday, June 27, 2008
The oceans are currently uptaking 22 million tons of CO 2 daily which is making a significant and exponential change in the ocean’s chemistry.
In 2004, it was projected that the pH balance of the oceans would be lower in the middle of this century than they had been for more than 20 MILLION years.
There was a spike in methane release last year from the thawing Arctic permafrost too. Scientists are concerned that as the Arctic continues to warm and the permafrost thaws a cycle of carbon release and temperature rise will add to the reverberating feedback cycle…In April Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA’s Earth System Research Lab said, “It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend.”
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That was just 2 short months ago. Now the grim news is that for the first time in human history the ice at the North Pole will disappear entirely if it continues its current rate it will be gone by summer’s end. Science is placing the odds at 50:50. About 70% of the sea ice this spring was new ice formed over last winter. New ice melts faster than the old ice.
Inuit natives, near Baffin Bay, are reporting the sea ice is breaking up much earlier than normal this year. They have also seen wide cracks appearing where the ice normally remains stable.
The rate of Arctic land warming is 3.5 times greater than the average 21st century
warming rates predicted in climate models; more feedback cycles. So much so that
Science News is reporting over the past century the leading edges of conifer forests
have crawled from 20-60 meters of the mountains and have begun to overrun the tundra.
There are now conifers growing where no living tree has grown in the last 1,000 years. The greening of the Arctic is something we don’t want. The albedo, or the extent of which light from the sun can be reflected will be decreased more and more as the ‘green’ of the plant material continues to advance toward the Arctic.
The cycle continues to compound as the tundra thaws and releases methane. Scientists think between 1/3 and 1/2 the CO 2 that has been produced by humans since
the industrial revolution is now in the ocean. Water that is upwelling today is water that was exposed to 1958 CO 2 concentrations. 50 years from now the water being upwelled will be that exposed to the methane and carbon dioxide levels of today…
So, the last thing the Bush Administration wants getting out is a 250 page report by the EPA giving detailed alternative approaches of how to regulate greenhouse gases!
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Did you ever hit that nasty ’send’ button on an email, and wish you could bring it back?
You aren’t alone. It generally happens to me after I’ve had a little too much wine. I’m not suggesting that’s the problem at the White House, but if the cork fits…
The White House demanded that an email the EPA had ’sent’ be ‘recalled’. If, however, the pesky ’send’ button has already been hit, then the White House has its own simple and fairly elegant solution to news it just doesn’t want to see. Just don’t open the email.
That won’t work either.
The EPA apparently had 250 pages of ‘detailed alternative approaches’ to regulate greenhouse gases from fuels, cars and some industry. But, no; the White House doesn’t want anything to do with solving problems. It appears, as is widely speculated, this administration is all about creating problems. Speculated is a generous term in this case. The time for speculation, in regard to the intentions of this administration, has long past.
The Supreme Court had already tried to set the White House straight when it ruled carbon dioxide is an air pollutant, and the Clean Air Act gave the EPA the power to start mandating that new vehicles to reduce their pollutants.
If we do have the technology and the money to regulate greenhouse gases it seems apparent those in power don’t want us to know about them.
Photo Thanks: NOAA
Labels: Acid Ocean, Arctic, Arctic Ice, Baffin, CO2, EPA, Methane, NOAA, North Pole, Ocean, Speak no Evil, Tundra, carbon dioxide, cover-up
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Learn To Take Your Drinks ‘neat’; We’re running out of ice, among other things.
