While the Earth’s Polar Regions are similar in many ways, the North and South Poles also display stark differences, with the arctic being far more hospitable in many ways to its polar opposite. The Antarctic has no record of primitive humans and no native groups and the first crossing occurred in 1773 by James Cook. The Arctic on the other hand has been crossed from prehistoric times and is home to natives with a long cultural record. The annual mean temperature at the South Pole is -58F whilst at the North Pole it’s a comfortable 0F. For a comprehensive view of world news about the Arctic and Antarctica; its people, politics and environment read our news archive of 177 articles CLICK HERE
Source: http://hidethedecline.eu/media/Nautisk/fig1big.gif
NPR – A new study has some reassuring news about how fast Greenland’s glaciers are melting away. Greenland’s glaciers hold enough water to raise sea level by 20 feet, and they are melting as the planet warms, so there’s a lot at stake. A few years ago, the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland really caught people’s attention. In short order, this slow-moving stream of ice suddenly doubled its speed. It started dumping a whole lot more ice into the Atlantic. Other glaciers also sped up. Read Article
NASA – Warm ocean currents attacking the underside of ice shelves are the dominant cause of recent ice loss from Antarctica, a new study using measurements from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) revealed.
An international team of scientists used a combination of satellite measurements and models to differentiate between the two known causes of melting ice shelves: warm ocean currents thawing the underbelly of the floating extensions of ice sheets and warm air melting them from above. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, brings scientists a step closer to providing reliable projections of future sea level rise.
The researchers concluded that 20 of the 54 ice shelves studied are being melted by warm ocean currents. Most of these are in West Antarctica, where inland glaciers flowing down to the coast and feeding into these thinning ice shelves have accelerated, draining more ice into the sea and contributing to sea-level rise. This ocean-driven thinning is responsible for the most widespread and rapid ice losses in West Antarctica, and for the majority of Antarctic ice sheet loss during the study period. Read Article
Editorial Comment – This really makes all the hype over the now discredited Steig et al. paper, which attempted to establish an air temperature warming trend as one of the possible causes for “Antarctic melting”, only to have the Mannian PCA math they used shot down in flames for smearing data from the Antarctic Peninsula all over the continent, look even weaker.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Source: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/n_stddev_timeseries_corrected.png
ScienceDaily — A new study using satellite mapping technology reveals there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought. The results provide an important benchmark for monitoring the impact of environmental change on the population of this iconic bird, which breeds in remote areas that are very difficult to study because they often are inaccessible with temperatures as low as -58 degrees Fahrenheit [50 degrees Celcius]. Read article
New Scientist – Oil giant Shell last week overcame the last major legal obstacle to its plans in the Arctic Ocean this summer. On Wednesday, the US Department of the Interior (DoI) approved the firm’s oil spill response plan, effectively granting permission for exploratory drilling in the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska. Shell intends to drill from the start of July and must stop by the end of October, before the dark, cold and ice set in for winter. They received permission to drill in the nearby Chukchi Sea in February, and are now awaiting permits from environmental agencies. Read article
A fundamental tenet of global warming is shorter winters and longer melt seasons in the Arctic.
It appears quite possible that the winter of 2011-2012 will be the longest winter on record in the Arctic. Freeze-up began during the first week in September, and probably won’t end until the last week in March. Nearly seven full months of increasing ice extent – almost a full month longer than normal.
SOURCE: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
SOURCE: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
New Scientist – THE East Antarctic ice sheet looks unlikely to release its frozen grip any time soon. A new model suggests that prehistoric sea-level rise long thought to have been caused by the ice sheet melting was actually the result of local subsidence. About 400,000 years ago, Earth went through a warm interglacial period similar to today’s. The geological record shows traces of beaches and marine fossils in areas of Bermuda and the Bahamas far from the coast, suggesting that sea level was 20 metres higher than now. Global sea level could have been that high only if the East Antarctic ice sheet melted at the time, according to climate models. And that is odd: this ice sheet doesn’t seem to have melted at any other point in its long history. Read Article
While the Earth’s Polar Regions are similar in many ways, the North and South Poles also display stark differences, with the arctic being far more hospitable in many ways to its polar opposite. The Antarctic has no record of primitive humans and no native groups and the first crossing occurred in 1773 by James Cook. The Arctic on the other hand has been crossed from prehistoric times and is home to natives with a long cultural record. The annual mean temperature at the South Pole is -58F whilst at the North Pole it’s a comfortable 0F. For a comprehensive view of world news about the Arctic and Antarctica; its people, politics and environment read our news archive of 165 articles CLICK HERE
PhysOrg – More than 99 percent of Antarctic blue whales were killed by commercial whalers during the 20th century, but the first circumpolar genetic study of these critically endangered whales has found a surprisingly high level of diversity among the surviving population of some 2,200 individuals. That, says lead author Angela Sremba of Oregon State University, may bode well for their future recovery. Results of the study have just been published in the open-access journal, PLoS ONE. Read article
Source: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/seaice-anomaly-antarctic3.png
Daily News Minder – It’s official. January 2012 went down as the fifth-coldest January on record in Fairbanks. The average temperature for the month at Fairbanks International Airport was was 26.9 degrees below zero, which was two-tenths of a degree colder than January 1969, according to a statement released by the National Weather Service on Wednesday. Read article
ScienceDaily (Jan. 17, 2012) — Geoscientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Minnesota this week published the first evidence that warm-cold climate oscillations well known in the Northern Hemisphere over the most recent glacial period also appear as tropical rainfall variations in the Amazon Basin of South America. It is the first clear expression of these cycles in the Southern Hemisphere.
The work by Stephen Burns and his doctoral student Lisa Kanner at UMass Amherst is reported in the current issue of Science. Burns says, “The study also demonstrates that rainfall in the Southern Hemisphere of South America is, though to a lesser extent, also influenced by temperature changes in the Antarctic, which has not been previously observed.”
The last glacial period, from about 10,000 to about 120,000 years ago, saw North America and Western Europe covered in a thick continental ice sheet, the geoscientist points out. Yet climate was also highly unstable during the period, cycling every few thousand years between warm and cold, dry periods in the high northern latitudes. Temperatures could change by as much as 10 to 15 degrees Celsius. Read Article
While the Earth’s Polar Regions are similar in many ways, the North and South Poles also display stark differences, with the arctic being far more hospitable in many ways to its polar opposite. The Antarctic has no record of primitive humans and no native groups and the first crossing occurred in 1773 by James Cook. The Arctic on the other hand has been crossed from prehistoric times and is home to natives with a long cultural record. The annual mean temperature at the South Pole is -58F whilst at the North Pole it’s a comfortable 0F. For a comprehensive view of world news about the Arctic and Antarctica; its people, politics and environment read our news archive of 161 articles CLICK HERE
ScienceDaily — A hemispherewide phenomenon — and not just regional forces — has caused record-breaking amounts of freshwater to accumulate in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea. Frigid freshwater flowing into the Arctic Ocean from three of Russia’s mighty rivers was diverted hundreds of miles to a completely different part of the ocean in response to a decades-long shift in atmospheric pressure associated with the phenomenon called the Arctic Oscillation, according to findings published in the Jan. 5 issue of Nature. Read article
Daily Mail – A wildlife scientist, whose report on dead polar bears in Arctic waters became a rallying call for climate change campaigners, will face a lie detector test as part of an investigation by federal agents. Jeffrey Gleason, who co-wrote a 2006 report highlighting the danger posed to the animals by melting ice, will take a polygraph over alleged scientific misconduct connected to the study, the Independent reported. Read Article
Nature – Chemical ozone destruction occurs over both polar regions in local winter–spring. In the Antarctic, essentially complete removal of lower-stratospheric ozone currently results in an ozone hole every year, whereas in the Arctic, ozone loss is highly variable and has until now been much more limited. Here we demonstrate that chemical ozone destruction over the Arctic in early 2011 was—for the first time in the observational record—comparable to that in the Antarctic ozone hole. Read Article
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
Received 6 October 2010; revised 10 January 2011; Accepted 28 January 2011. Available online 4 February 2011.
Do blue-ice moraines in the Heritage Range show the West Antarctic ice sheet survived the last interglacial?
Authors: Christopher J. Fogwilla, , Andrew S. Heinb, , Michael J. Bentleyc, , David E. Sugdenb,
Abstract
We present a hypothesis that best explains cosmogenic isotope data on blue-ice moraines in the Heritage Range, West Antarctica. The age of the moraines implies that they, and the related ice-sheet surface with which they are associated, have persisted on the flanks of nunataks throughout at least the last interglacial/glacial cycle. The implication is that although the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) may have fluctuated in thickness during glacial cycles, the central dome has remained intact for at least 200 kyr and possibly even for 400 kyr. Such a finding, if substantiated, would contribute to our understanding of the sensitivity of the WAIS to climate change. Further it would be a powerful geomorphic constraint on models of the past behaviour of the ice sheet during glacial cycles and thus those predicting the future of the ice sheet in a warming world. Read Paper
NPR – In southwest Alaska, officials are counting votes on a controversial initiative to stop an open-pit copper and gold mine. If passed, the initiative could stop the developers from getting permits they need to start digging at Pebble Mine. The mine’s location, near the spawning grounds for the largest sockeye salmon runs in the world, worries conservation groups, commercial fishermen and sport fishers. Read Article
