More Melting

More first year ice.

Arctic ice continued its decline this winter, with hearty old ice increasingly being replaced with quick-to-melt young ice, according to a new report by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

This winter's maximum Arctic sea ice extent was 5.85 million square miles (15,150,000 square kilometers)—about 278,000 square miles (720,000 square kilometers) less than the Arctic average between 1979 and 2000.

"That's a loss about the size of the state of Texas," said Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.

"We used to have a winter ice maximum about twice the size of the lower 48 United States," Meier added.

This year's ice cover was not a record low, but it did continue a dubious streak. The past six years (2004-09) have seen the least Arctic ice at the time of maximum cover, in winter, since satellite records began in 1979.

The new ice melts faster than old ice. When the ice around Greenland disappears, their glaciers are going to melt faster. Meaning more warming, melting, and sea rising. It is going to be an interesting couple of decades.

Rubber Ducky

Your the one, that makes melting glaciers so much fun.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - To help figure out what's happening inside the fastest-moving Greenland glacier, a U.S. rocket scientist sent 90 rubber ducks into the ice, hoping someone finds them if they emerge in Baffin Bay.

The common yellow plastic bath toys are one part of a sophisticated experiment to determine why glaciers speed up in the summer in their march to the sea, said Alberto Behar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Could be a while before the duckies manage to wiggle through.

Greenland's Glaciers Are Calving

At a very rapid pace.

Images retrieved from NASA satellites and cameras monitoring the island's glaciers revealed that a chunk measuring 11 square miles (29 square kilometers) broke away from the Petermann Glacier between July 10 and 24. For its part, Jakobshavn lost at least 3 square miles (10 square kilometers) since the end of the last melt season, and its northern section has broken up in recent weeks.

To make matters worse, the scientists observed an enormous crack forming back from the margin of the Petermann Glacier, which Box cautioned could point to "an imminent and much larger breakup" -- a loss that could amount to 60 square miles (160 square kilometers), or roughly one-third of the glacier.

At some point Greenland's rate of melting is going to be exponential and catastrophic. Miami and Manhattan are at sea level. Boston and Baltimore are at sea level.

I'm Melting

A video of the polar ice shelf. It still has ice on the Greenland side. When the sheet is gone, Greenland's ice sheet will melt much faster. Notice how the ice shelf gets away from land it never really goes back. Just as a reminder there is enough water to raise the level of the ocean 22 feet. It may be green again in my life time.
Via TreeHugger.

Tipping Point

Scientists are warning we may reach a tipping point for Greenland' ice sheet melting.

They urged governments to be more aware of "tipping points" in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon.

"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change," the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature.

Personly I think we passed the tipping point and should be moving to high ground. But, what do I know?

Greenland

Greenland may be green again. It amazes me that the amount of ice that melted this year raised sea level by 2/100th of an inch. The oceans are huge. Just think if all the ice melted.

Greenland is about one-fourth the size of the United States and about 80 percent of it is covered by the ice sheet. One-twentieth of the world's ice is in Greenland; if it all melted it would be equivalent to a 21-foot (6.4 meter) global sea level rise, the scientists said.

It seems that magma may be heating Greenland from below as well. Perhaps we have the makings for the perfect storm.

The newly discovered hotspot, an area where Earth’s crust is thinner, allowing hot magma from Earth's mantle to come closer to the surface, is just below the ice sheet and could have caused it to form, von Frese and his team suggest.