After Ice Shelf Collapse, Antarctic Glaciers' Flow Rate Up 200-600%

"When Antarctica’s Larsen-B ice shelf—a 10,000-year-old, 650-foot thick expanse of floating ice the size of Rhode Island—collapsed three years ago, Pedro Skvarca had a front-row seat. With the Antarctic Peninsula being swept by an unprecedented summer heat wave in February 2002, Skvarca, a glaciologist with the Argentine Antarctic Institute, jumped in a rugged twin-engine turboprop and flew off from his Antarctic research station to inspect the cliff-like seaward edge of the remote ice shelf. What he saw, Skvarca recalls, was astonishing. “The surface of the ice shelf was almost totally covered by melt ponds and lakes, and waterfalls were spilling over the top and into the ocean,” he says. Great slices of the Larsen-B’s leading edge had broken off, filling the Weddell Sea with icebergs and slush. Two weeks later, almost the entire ice shelf had disintegrated. “It was unbelievable to see how fast it had broken up. The coastline hadn’t changed for more than 9,000 years and then it changed completely in just a few weeks.”

Now scientists studying the aftermath of the collapse say it will very likely have unpleasant implications for the rest of us. The collapse of the Larsen-B and its smaller northern neighbors, the Larsen-A and Wordie Ice shelves, in the face of warmer summer temperatures has caused the vast glaciers and ice sheets behind them to begin sliding into the sea at a remarkable pace. Aerial and satellite imagery show that the glaciers behind the Larsen-B increased their seaward flow by two to six times in the months after the ice shelf’s collapse, with some of them thinning by more than 100 feet. Unlike the floating ice shelves, thinning glaciers contribute to global sea-level rise.

“The glaciers took off like a race horse after the ice shelves were removed,” says Ted Scambos, a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. “Just a decade ago we glaciologists were talking about gradual changes in glaciers taking place over centuries. Now we’re seeing things that we didn’t think glaciers could do in terms of their speed of response.”

And it’s not just happening on the Antarctic Peninsula. Similar studies of glaciers entering the Amundsen Sea, some 1,200 miles away in West Antarctica, show them doubling their flow since the 1990s. This is especially worrying because the glaciers in this area drain the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a precariously balanced portion of the southern ice cap that contains enough ice to raise sea levels by 20 feet. By comparison, the sea-level rise predictions endorsed by the 2,600 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are only about two feet by 2100."

EDIT

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2302

how, for whatever reasons, people, governments, ignore global warming. The profound effects this will have on our climate alone should be worthy enough for governments to take their heads out of the sand. I am worried what kind of climate my future generations will have to face.

but making a buck, a yen, a pound, a euro, a scheckle, a whatever is far more important than our future generations.

Unless you're on the high side of 50, this will affect YOUR generation.

Would make a pretty good spot for Bin Laden to nuke.

The Nile Delta and the Tigris and Euphrates deltas would be in big trouble.

http://www.geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climate_change_and_sea_level/sea_level_rise/sea_level_rise.htm

On edit: Not to mention Bangladesh, parts of Pakistan, and a good chunk of Malaysia.

*glub* *glub*