Antarctic ice shelf thinning accelerates

[CrusaderFrank]

View attachment 38769

Where will the penguins go!!!

Where will your children go?

Keep family out of it fuckface

 

[Old Rocks]

It is already too late to do anything. We have already gone off the cliff. Even if it were not, those who could do something have too much invested in the status quo to do anything. Those who currently deny anything is actually happening will continue to do so until it is undeniable, and then blame those who told them it was happening for not doing something about it. Human behavior is entirely predictable.

There is no status quo. Why you folks won't accept the fact you can;t control nature is beyond me.

Why you are so fucking dumb that you can't see that we have overwhelmed nature already?

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Moreover, there's an 800,000 year data set demonstrating that CO2 lags temperature and never leads it, not once.

I don't really get your point.

Are you suggesting that raising temperatures are causing humans to add more CO2 to the air?

 

[kflaux]

The difference between the two situations was slavery was entirely under the control of human beings. To stop it all we had to do was stop doing it. What is currently going on is now out of our hands. We have already passed the point of no return.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't think anyone knows.

To go on fighting in the hope that we still have some chance of salvaging the situation is I think one working definition of courage....

The best we can do now is perhaps slow it down a bit and mitigate some of the damages, but that is it.

And because of the nonlinearity of the system, that may make a huge difference. Again, nobody knows for sure.

 

[jc456]

The difference between the two situations was slavery was entirely under the control of human beings. To stop it all we had to do was stop doing it. What is currently going on is now out of our hands. We have already passed the point of no return.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't think anyone knows.

To go on fighting in the hope that we still have some chance of salvaging the situation is I think one working definition of courage....

The best we can do now is perhaps slow it down a bit and mitigate some of the damages, but that is it.

And because of the nonlinearity of the system, that may make a huge difference. Again, nobody knows for sure.

yawn!!!!

 

[jc456]

Antarctic Ice Shelf Thinning Speeds Up
BBCNews

Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves and they find them to be thinning at an accelerating rate.
Fernando Paolo and colleagues used 18 years of data from European radar satellites to compile their assessment.
In the first half of that period, the total losses from these tongues of ice that jut out from the continent amounted to 25 cubic km per year.
But by the second half, this had jumped to 310 cubic km per annum.
"For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," said Mr Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, US.
"Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade," he told BBC News.
The satellite research is published in Science Magazine. It is a step up from previous studies, which provided only short snapshots of behaviour. Here, the team has combined the data from three successive orbiting altimeter missions operated by the European Space Agency (Esa).
Faster flow
The findings demonstrate the value of continuous, long-term, cross-calibrated time series of information.
Many of Antarctica's ice shelves are huge. The one protruding into the Ross Sea is the size of France.
They form where glacier ice running off the continent protrudes across water. At a certain point, the ice lifts off the seabed and floats.
Eventually, as these shelves continue to push outwards, their fronts will calve, forming icebergs.
If the losses to the ocean balance the gains on land though precipitation of snows, this entirely natural process contributes nothing to sea level rise. But if thinning weakens the shelves so that land ice can flow faster towards the sea, this will kick the system out of kilter. Repeat observations now show this to be the case across much of West Antarctica.
"If this thinning continues at the rates we report, some of the ice shelves in West Antarctica that we've observed will disappear by the end of this century," said Scripps co-author Helen Amanda Fricker.
"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."
Prof Fricker was speaking on this week's Science In Action programme for the BBC World Service.
Modelling capability
Various studies have now confirmed that the land, or grounded, ice in Antarctica is losing mass.
Esa's current polar observing spacecraft, known as Cryosat, recently reported that the continent's ice sheet was diminishing at a rate of 160 billion tonnes a year. Cryosat found the average elevation of the full ice sheet to be falling annually by almost 2cm.
It is thought that all this thinning is predominantly the consequence of warm water getting under the floating ice at the continent's margins to melt it from below.
This warmer water appears to be being drawn towards Antarctica by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean.
But the precise drivers at work and their scale are poorly understood. And until scientists get a better grasp of some of these issues, their ability to project future change will be limited.
Prof David Vaughan is the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and was not involved in the Paolo paper.
He commented: "We need three components: we need to understand the changes in the grounded ice; how the floating ice is behaving; and finally how the oceanographic conditions under the floating ice have changed. With those three things, we have the basis for building really good models. Ten years ago, we didn't have any one of those elements. Today, we've made good progress on two, but on the oceanographic side we're only just beginning."
BAS recently placed moorings in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica to gather data on ocean conditions. In the same sector, BAS also sent a sub under the floating shelf ahead of Pine Island Glacier to better understand how water moves under the ice.
*********************************************************************
I think we're going to find that, like the rest of the world, Antarctica has been responding to ongoing global warming just about precisely as it was expected to do so.

The Earth continues to warm. The primary cause of that warming is human GHG emissions and deforestation. Claims that it is not, that there is no greenhouse effect, that CO2 does not behave as scientists have understood it to behave for the last hundred years, are going to make some bitter crow on which some will be forced to dine.

I love this place, skooks check this one out!!!! the OP opening sentence:

"Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves" Note the big word there, 'floating' so folks if it is already floating, melting will cause zero sea rise. can you hear me, zero sea rise. here a little louder...ZERO......or ZERO

 

[PratchettFan]

The difference between the two situations was slavery was entirely under the control of human beings. To stop it all we had to do was stop doing it. What is currently going on is now out of our hands. We have already passed the point of no return.

Maybe, maybe not. I don't think anyone knows.

To go on fighting in the hope that we still have some chance of salvaging the situation is I think one working definition of courage....

The best we can do now is perhaps slow it down a bit and mitigate some of the damages, but that is it.

And because of the nonlinearity of the system, that may make a huge difference. Again, nobody knows for sure.

"Know" is a dangerous word, but I think it is the general consensus that stopping the landslide is no longer an option. I am not saying we should not do what we can. I am just not optimistic that we will do anything meaningful at all. It would require leadership more concerned with the future than the present, and I don't see that leadership anywhere on this planet.

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Antarctic Ice Shelf Thinning Speeds Up
BBCNews

Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves and they find them to be thinning at an accelerating rate.
Fernando Paolo and colleagues used 18 years of data from European radar satellites to compile their assessment.
In the first half of that period, the total losses from these tongues of ice that jut out from the continent amounted to 25 cubic km per year.
But by the second half, this had jumped to 310 cubic km per annum.
"For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," said Mr Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, US.
"Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade," he told BBC News.
The satellite research is published in Science Magazine. It is a step up from previous studies, which provided only short snapshots of behaviour. Here, the team has combined the data from three successive orbiting altimeter missions operated by the European Space Agency (Esa).
Faster flow
The findings demonstrate the value of continuous, long-term, cross-calibrated time series of information.
Many of Antarctica's ice shelves are huge. The one protruding into the Ross Sea is the size of France.
They form where glacier ice running off the continent protrudes across water. At a certain point, the ice lifts off the seabed and floats.
Eventually, as these shelves continue to push outwards, their fronts will calve, forming icebergs.
If the losses to the ocean balance the gains on land though precipitation of snows, this entirely natural process contributes nothing to sea level rise. But if thinning weakens the shelves so that land ice can flow faster towards the sea, this will kick the system out of kilter. Repeat observations now show this to be the case across much of West Antarctica.
"If this thinning continues at the rates we report, some of the ice shelves in West Antarctica that we've observed will disappear by the end of this century," said Scripps co-author Helen Amanda Fricker.
"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."
Prof Fricker was speaking on this week's Science In Action programme for the BBC World Service.
Modelling capability
Various studies have now confirmed that the land, or grounded, ice in Antarctica is losing mass.
Esa's current polar observing spacecraft, known as Cryosat, recently reported that the continent's ice sheet was diminishing at a rate of 160 billion tonnes a year. Cryosat found the average elevation of the full ice sheet to be falling annually by almost 2cm.
It is thought that all this thinning is predominantly the consequence of warm water getting under the floating ice at the continent's margins to melt it from below.
This warmer water appears to be being drawn towards Antarctica by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean.
But the precise drivers at work and their scale are poorly understood. And until scientists get a better grasp of some of these issues, their ability to project future change will be limited.
Prof David Vaughan is the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and was not involved in the Paolo paper.
He commented: "We need three components: we need to understand the changes in the grounded ice; how the floating ice is behaving; and finally how the oceanographic conditions under the floating ice have changed. With those three things, we have the basis for building really good models. Ten years ago, we didn't have any one of those elements. Today, we've made good progress on two, but on the oceanographic side we're only just beginning."
BAS recently placed moorings in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica to gather data on ocean conditions. In the same sector, BAS also sent a sub under the floating shelf ahead of Pine Island Glacier to better understand how water moves under the ice.
*********************************************************************
I think we're going to find that, like the rest of the world, Antarctica has been responding to ongoing global warming just about precisely as it was expected to do so.

The Earth continues to warm. The primary cause of that warming is human GHG emissions and deforestation. Claims that it is not, that there is no greenhouse effect, that CO2 does not behave as scientists have understood it to behave for the last hundred years, are going to make some bitter crow on which some will be forced to dine.

I love this place, skooks check this one out!!!! the OP opening sentence:

"Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves" Note the big word there, 'floating' so folks if it is already floating, melting will cause zero sea rise. can you hear me, zero sea rise. here a little louder...ZERO......or ZERO

Ice shelves are part of what keeps glaciers and ice sheets from sliding into the ocean. Did you know that?

 

[Porker]

Climate change has frequently been likened to slavery in the U.S. before the Civil War.

That's funny shit right there^^^^. Frequently likened to slavery, you say? You have just dethroned the champion as the world's dumbest algoreist cult member. If you're going to say something ridiculous you could not possibly use a worse analogy. Slavery = global warming. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Moreover, there's an 800,000 year data set demonstrating that CO2 lags temperature and never leads it, not once.

I don't really get your point.

Are you suggesting that raising temperatures are causing humans to add more CO2 to the air?

No. Raising temperature cause an increase in CO2

Here's a 400,000 year data set and not once did CO2 act as the AGWCult proposed

400,000 years

 

[CrusaderFrank]

View attachment 38769

Where will the penguins go!!!

Where will your children go?

Keep family out of it fuckface

You family will suffer for you stupidity and refusal to see reality. You are one dumb asshole, and it is unfortunate that what will happen will affect them more than you.

Keep family out of it fuckface #2

 

[Liminal]

The ice caps on Antarctica and Greenland are melting at an accelerated rate. There is no actual controversy about that.

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Moreover, there's an 800,000 year data set demonstrating that CO2 lags temperature and never leads it, not once.

I don't really get your point.

Are you suggesting that raising temperatures are causing humans to add more CO2 to the air?

No. Raising temperature cause an increase in CO2

Here's a 400,000 year data set and not once did CO2 act as the AGWCult proposed

400,000 years

I'm not talking about the past 400,000 years. I'm talking about the last 150. Are you saying rising temperatures are what caused the co2 to go up in the last 150 years? Yes or no?

 

[jc456]

Moreover, there's an 800,000 year data set demonstrating that CO2 lags temperature and never leads it, not once.

I don't really get your point.

Are you suggesting that raising temperatures are causing humans to add more CO2 to the air?

No. Raising temperature cause an increase in CO2

Here's a 400,000 year data set and not once did CO2 act as the AGWCult proposed

400,000 years

I'm not talking about the past 400,000 years. I'm talking about the last 150. Are you saying rising temperatures are what caused the co2 to go up in the last 150 years? Yes or no?

dude, you can't really be that stupid can you? If it is the past 400,000 years, doesn't that include the last 150? I'm just saying, goofy is as goofy does. way to go goofy!!!!

 

[jc456]

Antarctic Ice Shelf Thinning Speeds Up
BBCNews

Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves and they find them to be thinning at an accelerating rate.
Fernando Paolo and colleagues used 18 years of data from European radar satellites to compile their assessment.
In the first half of that period, the total losses from these tongues of ice that jut out from the continent amounted to 25 cubic km per year.
But by the second half, this had jumped to 310 cubic km per annum.
"For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," said Mr Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, US.
"Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade," he told BBC News.
The satellite research is published in Science Magazine. It is a step up from previous studies, which provided only short snapshots of behaviour. Here, the team has combined the data from three successive orbiting altimeter missions operated by the European Space Agency (Esa).
Faster flow
The findings demonstrate the value of continuous, long-term, cross-calibrated time series of information.
Many of Antarctica's ice shelves are huge. The one protruding into the Ross Sea is the size of France.
They form where glacier ice running off the continent protrudes across water. At a certain point, the ice lifts off the seabed and floats.
Eventually, as these shelves continue to push outwards, their fronts will calve, forming icebergs.
If the losses to the ocean balance the gains on land though precipitation of snows, this entirely natural process contributes nothing to sea level rise. But if thinning weakens the shelves so that land ice can flow faster towards the sea, this will kick the system out of kilter. Repeat observations now show this to be the case across much of West Antarctica.
"If this thinning continues at the rates we report, some of the ice shelves in West Antarctica that we've observed will disappear by the end of this century," said Scripps co-author Helen Amanda Fricker.
"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."
Prof Fricker was speaking on this week's Science In Action programme for the BBC World Service.
Modelling capability
Various studies have now confirmed that the land, or grounded, ice in Antarctica is losing mass.
Esa's current polar observing spacecraft, known as Cryosat, recently reported that the continent's ice sheet was diminishing at a rate of 160 billion tonnes a year. Cryosat found the average elevation of the full ice sheet to be falling annually by almost 2cm.
It is thought that all this thinning is predominantly the consequence of warm water getting under the floating ice at the continent's margins to melt it from below.
This warmer water appears to be being drawn towards Antarctica by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean.
But the precise drivers at work and their scale are poorly understood. And until scientists get a better grasp of some of these issues, their ability to project future change will be limited.
Prof David Vaughan is the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and was not involved in the Paolo paper.
He commented: "We need three components: we need to understand the changes in the grounded ice; how the floating ice is behaving; and finally how the oceanographic conditions under the floating ice have changed. With those three things, we have the basis for building really good models. Ten years ago, we didn't have any one of those elements. Today, we've made good progress on two, but on the oceanographic side we're only just beginning."
BAS recently placed moorings in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica to gather data on ocean conditions. In the same sector, BAS also sent a sub under the floating shelf ahead of Pine Island Glacier to better understand how water moves under the ice.
*********************************************************************
I think we're going to find that, like the rest of the world, Antarctica has been responding to ongoing global warming just about precisely as it was expected to do so.

The Earth continues to warm. The primary cause of that warming is human GHG emissions and deforestation. Claims that it is not, that there is no greenhouse effect, that CO2 does not behave as scientists have understood it to behave for the last hundred years, are going to make some bitter crow on which some will be forced to dine.

I love this place, skooks check this one out!!!! the OP opening sentence:

"Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves" Note the big word there, 'floating' so folks if it is already floating, melting will cause zero sea rise. can you hear me, zero sea rise. here a little louder...ZERO......or ZERO

Ice shelves are part of what keeps glaciers and ice sheets from sliding into the ocean. Did you know that?

it ain't my article bub. You did read what I highlighted right? Do you know what the word 'float' means? Or are you still goofy?

 

[jc456]

The ice caps on Antarctica and Greenland are melting at an accelerated rate. There is no actual controversy about that.

sure there is!! what the heck are you talking about? Prove it.

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Antarctic Ice Shelf Thinning Speeds Up
BBCNews

Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves and they find them to be thinning at an accelerating rate.
Fernando Paolo and colleagues used 18 years of data from European radar satellites to compile their assessment.
In the first half of that period, the total losses from these tongues of ice that jut out from the continent amounted to 25 cubic km per year.
But by the second half, this had jumped to 310 cubic km per annum.
"For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," said Mr Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, US.
"Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade," he told BBC News.
The satellite research is published in Science Magazine. It is a step up from previous studies, which provided only short snapshots of behaviour. Here, the team has combined the data from three successive orbiting altimeter missions operated by the European Space Agency (Esa).
Faster flow
The findings demonstrate the value of continuous, long-term, cross-calibrated time series of information.
Many of Antarctica's ice shelves are huge. The one protruding into the Ross Sea is the size of France.
They form where glacier ice running off the continent protrudes across water. At a certain point, the ice lifts off the seabed and floats.
Eventually, as these shelves continue to push outwards, their fronts will calve, forming icebergs.
If the losses to the ocean balance the gains on land though precipitation of snows, this entirely natural process contributes nothing to sea level rise. But if thinning weakens the shelves so that land ice can flow faster towards the sea, this will kick the system out of kilter. Repeat observations now show this to be the case across much of West Antarctica.
"If this thinning continues at the rates we report, some of the ice shelves in West Antarctica that we've observed will disappear by the end of this century," said Scripps co-author Helen Amanda Fricker.
"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."
Prof Fricker was speaking on this week's Science In Action programme for the BBC World Service.
Modelling capability
Various studies have now confirmed that the land, or grounded, ice in Antarctica is losing mass.
Esa's current polar observing spacecraft, known as Cryosat, recently reported that the continent's ice sheet was diminishing at a rate of 160 billion tonnes a year. Cryosat found the average elevation of the full ice sheet to be falling annually by almost 2cm.
It is thought that all this thinning is predominantly the consequence of warm water getting under the floating ice at the continent's margins to melt it from below.
This warmer water appears to be being drawn towards Antarctica by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean.
But the precise drivers at work and their scale are poorly understood. And until scientists get a better grasp of some of these issues, their ability to project future change will be limited.
Prof David Vaughan is the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and was not involved in the Paolo paper.
He commented: "We need three components: we need to understand the changes in the grounded ice; how the floating ice is behaving; and finally how the oceanographic conditions under the floating ice have changed. With those three things, we have the basis for building really good models. Ten years ago, we didn't have any one of those elements. Today, we've made good progress on two, but on the oceanographic side we're only just beginning."
BAS recently placed moorings in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica to gather data on ocean conditions. In the same sector, BAS also sent a sub under the floating shelf ahead of Pine Island Glacier to better understand how water moves under the ice.
*********************************************************************
I think we're going to find that, like the rest of the world, Antarctica has been responding to ongoing global warming just about precisely as it was expected to do so.

The Earth continues to warm. The primary cause of that warming is human GHG emissions and deforestation. Claims that it is not, that there is no greenhouse effect, that CO2 does not behave as scientists have understood it to behave for the last hundred years, are going to make some bitter crow on which some will be forced to dine.

I love this place, skooks check this one out!!!! the OP opening sentence:

"Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves" Note the big word there, 'floating' so folks if it is already floating, melting will cause zero sea rise. can you hear me, zero sea rise. here a little louder...ZERO......or ZERO

Ice shelves are part of what keeps glaciers and ice sheets from sliding into the ocean. Did you know that?

it ain't my article bub. You did read what I highlighted right? Do you know what the word 'float' means? Or are you still goofy?

I did. Did you read what was past what you highlighted? From your own quotation:

"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."

Do you know what "rise" means?

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Moreover, there's an 800,000 year data set demonstrating that CO2 lags temperature and never leads it, not once.

I don't really get your point.

Are you suggesting that raising temperatures are causing humans to add more CO2 to the air?

No. Raising temperature cause an increase in CO2

Here's a 400,000 year data set and not once did CO2 act as the AGWCult proposed

400,000 years

I'm not talking about the past 400,000 years. I'm talking about the last 150. Are you saying rising temperatures are what caused the co2 to go up in the last 150 years? Yes or no?

dude, you can't really be that stupid can you? If it is the past 400,000 years, doesn't that include the last 150? I'm just saying, goofy is as goofy does. way to go goofy!!!!

. Are you saying rising temperatures are what caused the co2 to go up in the last 150 years? Yes or no?

 

[jc456]

Antarctic Ice Shelf Thinning Speeds Up
BBCNews

Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves and they find them to be thinning at an accelerating rate.
Fernando Paolo and colleagues used 18 years of data from European radar satellites to compile their assessment.
In the first half of that period, the total losses from these tongues of ice that jut out from the continent amounted to 25 cubic km per year.
But by the second half, this had jumped to 310 cubic km per annum.
"For the decade before 2003, ice-shelf volume for all Antarctica did not change much," said Mr Paolo from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, US.
"Since then, volume loss has been significant. The western ice shelves have been persistently thinning for two decades, and earlier gains in the eastern ice shelves ceased in the most recent decade," he told BBC News.
The satellite research is published in Science Magazine. It is a step up from previous studies, which provided only short snapshots of behaviour. Here, the team has combined the data from three successive orbiting altimeter missions operated by the European Space Agency (Esa).
Faster flow
The findings demonstrate the value of continuous, long-term, cross-calibrated time series of information.
Many of Antarctica's ice shelves are huge. The one protruding into the Ross Sea is the size of France.
They form where glacier ice running off the continent protrudes across water. At a certain point, the ice lifts off the seabed and floats.
Eventually, as these shelves continue to push outwards, their fronts will calve, forming icebergs.
If the losses to the ocean balance the gains on land though precipitation of snows, this entirely natural process contributes nothing to sea level rise. But if thinning weakens the shelves so that land ice can flow faster towards the sea, this will kick the system out of kilter. Repeat observations now show this to be the case across much of West Antarctica.
"If this thinning continues at the rates we report, some of the ice shelves in West Antarctica that we've observed will disappear by the end of this century," said Scripps co-author Helen Amanda Fricker.
"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."
Prof Fricker was speaking on this week's Science In Action programme for the BBC World Service.
Modelling capability
Various studies have now confirmed that the land, or grounded, ice in Antarctica is losing mass.
Esa's current polar observing spacecraft, known as Cryosat, recently reported that the continent's ice sheet was diminishing at a rate of 160 billion tonnes a year. Cryosat found the average elevation of the full ice sheet to be falling annually by almost 2cm.
It is thought that all this thinning is predominantly the consequence of warm water getting under the floating ice at the continent's margins to melt it from below.
This warmer water appears to be being drawn towards Antarctica by stronger westerly winds in the Southern Ocean.
But the precise drivers at work and their scale are poorly understood. And until scientists get a better grasp of some of these issues, their ability to project future change will be limited.
Prof David Vaughan is the director of science at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and was not involved in the Paolo paper.
He commented: "We need three components: we need to understand the changes in the grounded ice; how the floating ice is behaving; and finally how the oceanographic conditions under the floating ice have changed. With those three things, we have the basis for building really good models. Ten years ago, we didn't have any one of those elements. Today, we've made good progress on two, but on the oceanographic side we're only just beginning."
BAS recently placed moorings in the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica to gather data on ocean conditions. In the same sector, BAS also sent a sub under the floating shelf ahead of Pine Island Glacier to better understand how water moves under the ice.
*********************************************************************
I think we're going to find that, like the rest of the world, Antarctica has been responding to ongoing global warming just about precisely as it was expected to do so.

The Earth continues to warm. The primary cause of that warming is human GHG emissions and deforestation. Claims that it is not, that there is no greenhouse effect, that CO2 does not behave as scientists have understood it to behave for the last hundred years, are going to make some bitter crow on which some will be forced to dine.

I love this place, skooks check this one out!!!! the OP opening sentence:

"Scientists have their best view yet of the status of Antarctica's floating ice shelves" Note the big word there, 'floating' so folks if it is already floating, melting will cause zero sea rise. can you hear me, zero sea rise. here a little louder...ZERO......or ZERO

Ice shelves are part of what keeps glaciers and ice sheets from sliding into the ocean. Did you know that?

it ain't my article bub. You did read what I highlighted right? Do you know what the word 'float' means? Or are you still goofy?

I did. Did you read what was past what you highlighted? From your own link:

"A number of these ice shelves are holding back 1m to 3m of sea level rise in the grounded ice. And that means that ultimately this ice will be delivered into the oceans and we will see global sea-level rise on that order."

Do you know what "rise" means?

son if it is floating, the ice volume is already added to the level of water. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?

fill a glass fully up to the rim, freeze the liquid. Once frozen let it thaw, now tough question for you, when the liquid is thawed, does the liquid spill out?

Answer, only if you pour it, hit or knock it over. What a goof.

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

The ice caps on Antarctica and Greenland are melting at an accelerated rate. There is no actual controversy about that.

sure there is!! what the heck are you talking about? Prove it.