1Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

2Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization Oceans and Atmosphere, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

3Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

4Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78758, USA.

Science Advances  16 Dec 2016:
Vol. 2, no. 12, e1601610

Mass loss from the West Antarctic ice shelves and glaciers has been linked to basal melt by ocean heat flux. The Totten Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, which buttresses a marine-based ice sheet with a volume equivalent to at least 3.5 m of global sea-level rise, also experiences rapid basal melt, but the role of ocean forcing was not known because of a lack of observations near the ice shelf.

Observations from the Totten calving front confirm that (0.22 ± 0.07) × 106 m3 s−1 of warm water enters the cavity through a newly discovered deep channel. The ocean heat transport into the cavity is sufficient to support the large basal melt rates inferred from glaciological observations.

Change in ocean heat flux is a plausible physical mechanism to explain past and projected changes in this sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and its contribution to sea level.

Keywords: ocean-ice shelf interaction, Totten Glacier, East Antarctica, basal melt

Source: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1601610?utm_campaign=toc_advances_2016-12-16&et_rid=246526385&et_cid=1058269

Christopher Pala on Christmas Island, in Kiribati

Science  09 Dec 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6317, pp. 1210

Summary

A detailed, long-term ocean temperature record derived from corals on Christmas Island in Kiribati and other islands in the tropical Pacific shows that the extreme warmth of recent El Niño events reflects not just the natural ocean-atmosphere cycle but a new factor: global warming caused by human activity.

Over the last 7000 years, El Niños, which warm the eastern Pacific, waxed and waned. Then, during the 20th century, their intensity began to climb. The trend is likely to continue, boding ever-more-destructive El Niños in the future.

The finding helps settle a long-standing debate about the role of global warming in these events, which had been hard to resolve because records are short and spotty in the remote parts of the Pacific where El Niño hits hardest.

David A. Hodell, The Godwin Laboratory for Palaeoclimate Research, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ, UK.

Science  09 Dec 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6317, pp. 1235-1236

Summary

Forty years ago, Hays, Imbrie, and Shackleton in a paper in Science tested the hypothesis that small changes in Earth’s orbital geometry—namely precession, obliquity, and eccentricity—were responsible for the waxing and waning of the great continental ice sheets during the Quaternary period, which began about 2.58 million years ago (1). The paper is considered to be the “smoking gun” in support of the astronomical hypothesis of the Ice Ages, which is over a century old and most often ascribed to Milutin Milankovitch (2).

See also:www.FrackCheckWV.net