Showing posts with label Antarctic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antarctic. Show all posts

Sunday, November 29, 2015

In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended. ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, study finds.




GLOBAL WARMING? NASA says Antarctic has been COOLING for past SIX years

ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, according to US space agency NASA.

 

 
PUBLISHED: 07:51, Sat, Nov 28, 2015 | UPDATED: 12:58, Sat, Nov 28, 2015
 
Heimdal Glacier in southern Greenland, in an image captured on Oct. 13, 2015, from NASA Langley Research Center's Falcon 20 aircraft flying 33,000 fee 

NASA

Heimdal Glacier southern Greenland, from NASA's Falcon 20 aircraft at 33,000 feet above sea level.
An intensive scientific study of both Earth's poles has found that from 2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar region.NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an airborne survey of polar ice and has finalised two overlapping research campaigns at both the poles.In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended.Coupled with the latest announcement of slight cooling in the area, it has fuelled claims from climate change deniers that human industrialisation is not having the huge impact on global tenperature as often is claimed.
 
 
Map showing the extent of ice during the NASA studies 
NASA
Map showing the extent of ice during the NASA studies

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Examiner.com

New paper claims no pause in warming, but unaltered data says otherwise

November 25, 2015 9:20 AM MST
Authors Naomi Oreskes (L) and Erik Conway attend the 'Merchants of Doubt' premiere during the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
Photo by Aaron Harris

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Next: How NOAA rewrote climate data to hide global warming pause

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Nasa Earth Observatory

Earth is Cooling…No It’s Warming



In 1967 Hansen went to work for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York City, where he continued his research on planetary problems. Around 1970, some scientists suspected Earth was entering a period of global cooling. Decades prior, the brilliant Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch had explained how our world warms and cools on roughly 100,000-year cycles due to its slowly changing position relative to the Sun. Milankovitch’s theory suggested Earth should be just beginning to head into its next ice age cycle. The surface temperature data gathered by Mitchell seemed to agree; the record showed that Earth experienced a period of cooling (by about 0.3°C) from 1940 through 1970. Of course, Mitchell was only collecting data over a fraction of the Northern Hemisphere—from 20 to 90 degrees North latitude. Still, the result drew public attention and a number of speculative articles about Earth’s coming ice age appeared in newspapers and magazines.


Graph of Northern Hemisphere temperatures, 1860 through 1970

Initial efforts to observe Earth’s temperature were limited to the Northern Hemisphere, and they showed a cooling trend from 1940 to 1970 (jagged line). Scientists estimated the relative effects of carbon dioxide (warming, top curve) and aerosols (cooling, bottom curve) on climate, but did not have enough data to make precise predictions. (Graph from Mitchell, 1972.)


But other scientists forecasted global warming. Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko had also observed the three-decade cooling trend. Nevertheless, he published a paper in 1967 in which he predicted the cooling would soon switch to warming due to rising human emissions of carbon dioxide. Budyko’s paper and another paper published in 1975 by Veerabhadran Ramanathan caught Hansen’s attention. Ramanathan pointed out that human-made chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) are particularly potent greenhouse gases, with as much as 200 times the heat-retaining capacity of carbon dioxide. Because people were adding CFCs to the lower atmosphere at an increasing rate, Ramanathan expressed concern that these new gases would eventually add to Earth’s greenhouse effect and cause our world to warm. (Because CFCs also erode Earth’s protective ozone layer, their use was mostly abolished in 1989 with the signing of the Montreal Protocol.)



 
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This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Source: [[LINK||http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/||NOAA]])
This graph, based on the comparison of atmospheric samples contained in ice cores and more recent direct measurements, provides evidence that atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution. (Credit: Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record.)
 
The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.1
 
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.



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The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:


  • Republic of Maldives: Vulnerable to sea level rise
    Photograph by Shahee Ilyas  
    Malé, capital of Maldives  Wikipedia.org

    Sea level rise

    Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.4
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  • Global temperature rise

    All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.6 Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.7
     
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  • Warming oceans

    The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.8
     
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  • Flowing meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet

    Shrinking ice sheets

    The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.

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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Plugging an ozone hole : Ozone levels in the Arctic haven’t yet sunk to the extreme lows seen in Antarctica.

OZONE NEWS

Plugging an ozone hole


by Staff Writers
Boston MA (SPX) Apr 17, 2014


File image.
Since the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, scientists, policymakers, and the public have wondered whether we might someday see a similarly extreme depletion of ozone over the Arctic.
But a new MIT study finds some cause for optimism: Ozone levels in the Arctic haven't yet sunk to the extreme lows seen in Antarctica, in part because international efforts to limit ozone-depleting chemicals have been successful.
"While there is certainly some depletion of Arctic ozone, the extremes of Antarctica so far are very different from what we find in the Arctic, even in the coldest years," says Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT, and lead author of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Frigid temperatures can spur ozone loss because they create prime conditions for the formation of polar stratospheric clouds. When sunlight hits these clouds, it sparks a reaction between chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), human-made chemicals once used for refrigerants, foam blowing, and other applications - ultimately destroying ozone.
A success story of science and policy
After the ozone-attacking properties of CFCs were discovered in the 1980s, countries across the world agreed to phase out their use as part of the 1987 Montreal Protocol treaty. While CFCs are no longer in use, those emitted years ago remain in the atmosphere.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology


An aerial view of clouds over a mountain range in Greenland.
Courtesy of Michael Studinger/NASA Earth Observatory
Full Screen
Courtesy of Michael Studinger/NASA Earth Observatory

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An Arctic ozone hole? Not quite

MIT researchers find that the extremes in Antarctic ozone holes have not been matched in the Arctic.
Audrey Resutek | Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
April 14, 2014
Since the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, scientists, policymakers, and the public have wondered whether we might someday see a similarly extreme depletion of ozone over the Arctic.
But a new MIT study finds some cause for optimism: Ozone levels in the Arctic haven’t yet sunk to the extreme lows seen in Antarctica, in part because international efforts to limit ozone-depleting chemicals have been successful.
“While there is certainly some depletion of Arctic ozone, the extremes of Antarctica so far are very different from what we find in the Arctic, even in the coldest years,” says Susan Solomon, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MIT, and lead author of a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Frigid temperatures can spur ozone loss because they create prime conditions for the formation of polar stratospheric clouds. When sunlight hits these clouds, it sparks a reaction between chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), human-made chemicals once used for refrigerants, foam blowing, and other applications — ultimately destroying ozone.
'A success story of science and policy'
After the ozone-attacking properties of CFCs were discovered in the 1980s, countries across the world agreed to phase out their use as part of the 1987 Montreal Protocol treaty. While CFCs are no longer in use, those emitted years ago remain in the atmosphere. As a result, atmospheric concentrations have peaked and are now slowly declining, but it will be several decades before CFCs are totally eliminated from the environment — meaning there is still some risk of ozone depletion caused by CFCs.

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OZONE NEWS

NASA Pinpoints Causes of 2011 Arctic Ozone Hole


by Maria-Jose Vinas for NASA's Earth Science News Greenbelt MD (SPX) Mar 13, 2013


Maps of ozone concentrations over the Arctic come from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite. The left image shows March 19, 2010, and the right shows the same date in 2011. March 2010 had relatively high ozone, while March 2011 has low levels. Credit: NASA/Goddard.
A combination of extreme cold temperatures, man-made chemicals and a stagnant atmosphere were behind what became known as the Arctic ozone hole of 2011, a new NASA study finds. Even when both poles of the planet undergo ozone losses during the winter, the Arctic's ozone depletion tends to be milder and shorter-lived than the Antarctic's.
This is because the three key ingredients needed for ozone-destroying chemical reactions -chlorine from man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), frigid temperatures and sunlight- are not usually present in the Arctic at the same time: the northernmost latitudes are generally not cold enough when the sun reappears in the sky in early spring. Still, in 2011, ozone concentrations in the Arctic atmosphere were about 20 percent lower than its late winter average.
The new study shows that, while chlorine in the Arctic stratosphere was the ultimate culprit of the severe ozone loss of winter of 2011, unusually cold and persistent temperatures also spurred ozone destruction. Furthermore, uncommon atmospheric conditions blocked wind-driven transport of ozone from the tropics, halting the seasonal ozone resupply until April.
"You can safely say that 2011 was very atypical: In over 30 years of satellite records, we hadn't seen any time where it was this cold for this long," said Susan E. Strahan, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and main author of the new paper, which was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.
"Arctic ozone levels were possibly the lowest ever recorded, but they were still significantly higher than the Antarctic's," Strahan said. "There was about half as much ozone loss as in the Antarctic and the ozone levels remained well above 220 Dobson units, which is the threshold for calling the ozone loss a 'hole' in the Antarctic - so the Arctic ozone loss of 2011 didn't constitute an ozone hole."
The majority of ozone depletion in the Arctic happens inside the so-called polar vortex: a region of fast-blowing circular winds that intensify in the fall and isolate the air mass within the vortex, keeping it very cold.

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Thursday, January 2, 2014

Saga on the ice ends as Chinese helicopter flies stranded tourists, scientists and journalists to Australian vessel

Antarctic rescue: all 52 ship passengers airlifted to safety


antarctic rescue
The helicopter from Chinese icebreaker Xue Long arrives to collect passengers. Photograph: Reuters
All 52 passengers, including tourists, scientists and journalists, on board a ship trapped in Antarctica have been rescued, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) has confirmed.
The Akademik Shokalskiy became stuck in the ice on Christmas Eve and two icebreakers, the Aurora Australis and Chinese vessel Xue Long, have been trying in vain to reach it.
On Thursday afternoon a helicopter sent from the Xue Long landed next to the ship and began evacuating passengers, dropping them on sea ice next to the Aurora Australis 14 nautical miles away. Five flights were made, carrying all non-crew and their luggage.
“Aurora Australis advised Amsa that helicopter operations had been completed at about 10.45pm AEDT and all passengers, luggage and equipment had been transferred,” Amsa said in a statement.
The acting director of the Australian Antarctic division of the department of environment, Jason Mundy, said the rescue was carried out without a hitch and it was a relief to have all passengers on board the Aurora Australis.
“The passengers seem very glad to now be with us and they are settling into their new accommodation. There are sufficient berths on the ship for the extra passengers and preparations have been made to ensure we can look after them well for this final part of their journey,” he said.
The “quite difficult” rescue was complicated by changing weather and ice conditions and passengers not trained for the complex situation, but it was not the most remote ever conducted by Amsa, said John Young, general manager of the authority’s rescue division.
“But we wouldn’t want it to be much more remote than this on a regular basis,” he said.
“Antarctica presents particular challenges, and we’re also grateful to the international Antarctic programs that co-operate in many respects, including this one.”

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Monday, October 14, 2013

Antarctic ozone hole linked to warming in southern Africa

OZONE NEWS

by Staff Writers Bindura, Zimbabwe (UPI) Oct 14, 2013



disclaimer: image is for illustration purposes only

A decades-long warming trend in southern Africa is likely the result of the ozone hole over the Antarctic and its effect on wind circulation, researchers say.
In early summer southern Africa is affected by what is known as the Angola Low, a low-pressure system that pulls in warm air from the lower latitudes, increasing temperatures.
But during the past 20 years, the researchers said, the annual rise in temperatures has been nearly two degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal.
Desmond Manatsa, a climate scientist at Bindura University of Science in Zimbabwe, working with international colleagues, analyzed climate data from 1979 to 2010, and found as the size of the ozone hole -- caused by human use of fluorocarbons -- grew, temperatures in southern Africa rose as well.

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Saturday, August 17, 2013

Analysis of an ice core taken by the National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide drilling project reveals that warming in Antarctica began about 22,000 years ago

EcoAlert: Changes in Earth's Orbit Appear to be Key to Antarctic Warming

Antarctica-warming-660
Image Credit:  Adventure Journal

Analysis of an ice core taken by the National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide drilling project reveals that warming in Antarctica began about 22,000 years ago, a few thousand years earlier than suggested by previous records. This timing shows that West Antarctica did not "wait for a cue" from the Northern Hemisphere to start warming, as scientists had previously supposed.
For more than a century scientists have known that Earth's ice ages are caused by the wobbling of the planet's orbit, which changes its orientation to the sun and affects the amount of sunlight reaching higher latitudes.
The Northern Hemisphere's last ice age ended about 20,000 years ago, and most evidence had indicated that the ice age in the Southern Hemisphere ended about 2,000 years later, suggesting that the South was responding to warming in the North.
But research published online Aug. 14 in the journal Nature shows that Antarctic warming began at least two, and perhaps four, millennia earlier than previously thought.
Most previous evidence for Antarctic climate change had come from ice cores drilled in East Antarctica, the highest and coldest part of the continent. However, a U.S.-led research team studying the West Antarctic core found that warming there was well underway 20,000 years ago.
WAIS Divide is a large-scale and multi-year glaciology project supported by the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP), which NSF manages. Through USAP, NSF coordinates all U.S. science on the southernmost continent and aboard vessels in the Southern Ocean and provides the necessary logistics to make the science possible.



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Thursday, July 11, 2013

Climate Change - Antarctica [Pine Island Glacier] : Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, has spawned a huge iceberg

Earth Watch Report  -  Climate Change








See Additional  Photos Here

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10.07.2013Climate ChangeAntarctica [Pine Island Glacier]Damage level
 
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Climate Change in Antarctica on Wednesday, 10 July, 2013 at 10:15 (10:15 AM) UTC.


Description
Pine Island Glacier (PIG), the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, has spawned a huge iceberg. The block measures about 720 sq km in area - roughly eight times the size of Manhattan Island in New York. Scientists have been waiting for the PIG to calve since October 2011 when they first noticed a spectacular crack spreading across its surface. Confirmation that the fissure had extended the full width of the glacier was obtained on Monday. It was seen by the German TerraSAR-X satellite. This carries a radar instrument that can detect the surface of the ice stream even though the Antarctic is currently in the grip of winter darkness. The berg that broke away was part of the PIG's ice shelf - the front segment of the glacier that lifts up and floats as it pushes out into the ocean. The shelf will reach tens of km beyond the grounding line. German researchers have been receiving images from TerraSAR-X every three days or so, hoping to understand better the processes that drive the glacier forward and prompt it to fracture. This will help them improve the computer models that are used to forecast future changes in the Antarctic. "We were very keen to see how the crack propagated," said Prof Angelika Humbert, a glaciologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute. "We need proper calving laws, to be able to describe the evolution of ice sheets over centuries," she told BBC News.

Very big tabular bergs will come off the end of the ice shelf every 6-10 years. Previous notable events occurred in 2007 and 2001. It is a very natural process and scientists say it should not be tied directly to the very real climate changes that are also affecting this part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Satellite and airborne measurements have recorded a marked thinning and a surge in velocity of the PIG in recent decades. This has been attributed in part to warmer waters getting under, and melting, the ice shelf. The PIG's grounding line has pulled back further and further towards the land. The glacier's behaviour means it is now under close scrutiny, not least because it drains something like 10% of all the ice flowing off the west of the continent. "The PIG is the most rapidly shrinking glacier on the planet," explained Prof David Vaughan from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). "It's losing more ice than any other glacier on the planet, and it's contributing to sea level rise faster than any other glacier on the planet. That makes it worthy of study." BAS has recently deployed a series of instrumented "javelins" along the PIG to monitor its movement. When the big crack propagating across the 30km width of the PIG was first photographed in 2011 by a Nasa airborne expedition, many assumed the moment of final calving would come quite quickly.

That it took almost two years for the tabular berg to break away is something of a surprise, concedes Prof Humbert. What should not be a surprise, she says, is that it has occurred in deep winter when the ocean is covered in sea-ice. This relatively thin covering would always be overwhelmed by the internal stresses in the massive ice shelf. What will be interesting now, she adds, is to see how long it takes for the berg to move out of the bay in front of it. It could take several months. TerraSAR-X will provide the tell-tale data. The world's largest recorded iceberg was the tabular block that became known as B-15. When it broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in 2001, it had a surface area of about 11,000 sq km. It took years to melt away as it moved out into the Southern Ocean.
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A glacier
Pine Island Glacier's vast crack, pictured via NASA satellite late last fall.
Image courtesy NASA/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS

Richard A. Lovett


Published February 2, 2012

With a gargantuan crack slowly splitting it apart, Antarctica's fastest-melting glacier is about to lose a chunk of ice larger than all of New York City, scientists say.
(Also see "Manhattan-Size Ice Island Cracks in Half.")
The crevasse stretches 19 miles (30 kilometers) long and up to 260 feet (80 meters) wide, as shown in a picture taken by NASA's Terra satellite in October and featured this week as a NASA Image of the Day.
Snaking across the floating tongue of the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, the crack is expected to create an iceberg 350 square miles (907 square kilometers)—versus 303 square miles (785 square kilometers) for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA.
As for when the iceberg might shove off, "that is very difficult to predict," said oceanographer Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, "but in the coming months for sure."
Glacier "Contributing Most to Sea Level"
Usually there's nothing extraordinary about a glacier calving, said glaciologist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
Glaciers that flow into the sea, like the Pine Island Glacier, go through a normal cycle in which the floating section grows, stresses mount, and an iceberg breaks off, Scambos said.
"That is nothing unusual in most cases."



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