[Mb-civic] Global Disaster Will Follow If the Ice Cap on Greenland Melts

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

 http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1120-03.htm
  
  Published on Sunday, November 20, 2005 by the lndependent/UK
  The Big Thaw: Global Disaster Will Follow If the Ice Cap on Greenland Melts
  Now scientists say it is vanishing far faster than even they expected.
  by Geoffrey Lean
   
  
  Greenland's glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading  scientists to predict that the vast island's ice cap is approaching  irreversible meltdown, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
  
  
  Lines on this satellite image of Greenland's Helheim glacier show the  positions of the glacier front between 2001 and 2005. Image: I. Howat  et al.
  Research to be published in a few days' time shows how glaciers that  have been stable for centuries have started to shrink dramatically as  temperatures in the Arctic have soared with global warming. On top of  this, record amounts of the ice cap's surface turned to water this  summer.
  
  The two developments - the most alarming manifestations of climate  change to date - suggest that the ice cap is melting far more rapidly  than scientists had thought, with immense consequences for civilisation  and the planet. Its complete disappearance would raise the levels of  the world's seas by 20 feet, spelling inundation for London and other  coastal cities around the globe, along with much of low-lying countries  such as Bangladesh.
  
  More immediately, the vast amount of fresh water discharged into the  ocean as the ice melts threatens to shut down the Gulf Stream, which  protects Britain and the rest of northern Europe from a freezing  climate like that of Labrador.
  
  The revelations, which follow the announcement that the melting of sea  ice in the Arctic also reached record levels this summer, come as the  world's governments are about to embark on new negotiations about how  to combat global warming.
  
  This week they will meet in Montreal for the first formal talks on  whether there should be a new international treaty on cutting the  pollution that causes climate change after the Kyoto protocol expires  in seven years' time. Writing in The Independent yesterday, Tony Blair  called the meeting "crucial", adding that it "must start to shape an  inclusive global solution". But little progress is expected, largely  because of continued obstruction from President George Bush.
  
  The new evidence from Greenland, to be published in the journal  Geophysical Research Letters, shows a sudden decline in the giant  Helheim glacier, a river of ice that grinds down from the inland ice  cap to the sea through a narrow rift in the mountain range on the  island's east coast.
  
  Professor Slawek Tulaczyk, of the Department of Earth Sciences at the  University of California, Santa Cruz, told the IoS that the glacier had  dropped 100 feet this summer.
  
  Over the past four years, the research adds, the front of the glacier -  which has remained in the same place since records began - has  retreated four and a half miles. As it has retreated and thinned, the  effects have spread inland "very fast indeed", says Professor Tulaczyk.  As the centre of the Greenland ice cap is only 150 miles away, the  researchers fear that it, too, will soon be affected.
  
  The research echoes disturbing studies on the opposite side of  Greenland: the giant Jakobshavn glacier - at four miles wide and 1,000  feet thick the biggest on the landmass - is now moving towards the sea  at a rate of 113 feet a year; the normal annual speed of a glacier is  just one foot.
  
  The studies have found that water from melted ice on the surface is  percolating down through holes on the glacier until it forms a layer  between it and the rock below, slightly lifting it and moving it toward  the sea as if on a conveyor belt. This one glacier alone is reckoned  now to be responsible for 3 per cent of the annual rise of sea levels  worldwide.
  
  "We may be very close to the threshold where the Greenland ice cap will  melt irreversibly," says Tavi Murray, professor of glaciology at the  University of Wales. Professor Tulaczyk adds: "The observations that we  are seeing now point in that direction."
  
  Until now, scientists believed the ice cap would take 1,000 years to  melt entirely, but Ian Howat, who is working with Professor Tulaczyk,  says the new developments could "easily" cut this time "in half".
  
  There is also a more immediate danger as the melting ice threatens to  disrupt the Gulf Stream, responsible for Britain's mild climate. The  current, which brings us as much heat in winter as we get from the sun,  is driven by very salty water sinking off Greenland. This drives a deep  current of cold ocean southwards, in turn forcing the warm water north.
  
  Research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts has  shown, that even before the glaciers started accelerating, the water in  the North Atlantic was getting fresher in what it describes as "the  largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of  modern instruments".
  
  Even before these discoveries, scientists had shortened to evens the  odds on the Gulf Stream failing this century. When it failed before,  12,700 years ago, Britain was covered in permafrost for 1,300 years.
  
  © 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
  
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