Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
There is a new study that highlights what needs to happen if we are going to avoid a dramatic rise in sea level by 2100. The worst case scenario that we are now looking at is a rise of about four feet. The Study It is entitled “Linking sea level rise and socioeconomic indicators under … Read more
A new study grants us a bit of further insight into how a warming ocean is impacting the Antarctic. Entitled “Channelized Melting Drives Thinning Under a Rapidly Melting Antarctic Ice Shelf”, it was published a few days ago in Geophysical research Letters (full open access). It describes how the ocean is eating away underneath the Dotson … Read more
The Antarctic is of course glaciated and very very cold, that is well understood. What is new is the realisation that it is not all a barren lifeless landscape, but instead contains niches where life has potentially gained a foothold in a rather surprising way. Hidden under the ice are Geothermal ice caverns. This is because Antarctic … Read more
Last December I was writing about the widening rift that had been measured in the Larsen C Ice Shelf in the Antarctic by NASA’s #ICEBridge. I highlighted the inevitable – the breakup of the Larsen C ice shelf, and pointed out that this was part of the on-going process that had seen Larsen A disintegrate in … Read more
Hartmut Hellmer, Frank Kauker, Ralph Timmermann, and Tore Hattermann Alfred of the Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, have published a new paper that focuses on the potential collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf. It is entitled “The Fate of the Southern Weddell Sea Continental Shelf in a Warming Climate”, … Read more
The New York Times sent a team of four journalists and videographers to go with a Columbia University team to Antarctica late last year. They not only flew across the world’s largest chunk of floating ice in an American military cargo plane loaded with the latest scientific gear, but could also intermingle with the scientists for long periods of time, and so … Read more