Huge Risk of Extensive Ice Sheet Melting

First detailed atmospheric measurements reveal influences of warm air

From an Article by David Bromwich, et.al., Los Alamos National Laboratory, June 20, 2017

Scientists report that meltwater last summer formed on a large part of the surface of a major Antarctic ice sheet, extending over an area that was more than twice the size of California. This extensive surface melting was likely linked to a strong El Niño event, according to the team, and it is one of the most prominent surface melt events ever recorded in West Antarctica.

The team collected the first substantial field observations on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in 50 years and reported findings in the June 15 in Nature Communications. The study was the first to collect detailed measurements of atmospheric conditions and physical processes that help elucidate melt causes, including warm ocean air that extended as far as the Antarctica ice sheets.

“Antarctica is an extremely challenging environment to collect data, and that is why there are so few historical measurements from there, not only from the remote interior of the continent but also from its coastal ice sheets,” said Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Heath Powers, study coauthor and instrument and engineering team lead for this research. “Our capabilities of bringing state-of-the-art measurements to these very difficult but critical study areas is crucial to understanding how ice sheets respond to changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and climate. It is very rewarding to see these important findings resulting from our measurements.”

The historic 14-month field campaign, called the ARM West Antarctic Radiation Experiment (AWARE), began in late 2015 and was a partnership between the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Research Facility and the National Science Foundation (NSF). A team from Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Division deployed and managed ARM’s mobile research facilities at McMurdo Station and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

This melt could have global implications. Antarctica contains among the world’s largest ice sheets, and the West Antarctica Ice Sheet contains enough mass to raise sea levels by 11 feet or more if it ever becomes destabilized and fully melts.

Los Alamos participates in research to discover and understand signatures of change within complex climate and earth systems as part of its mission to understand their impacts and threats to global security.​

Study finds warm maritime air penetrating barriers

ARM’s unique, advanced cloud and aerosol instruments probed the frigid atmosphere and provided a sophisticated, complete observational data set to elucidate key processes that influence the dynamical coupling between the ice sheet and lower atmosphere. The data are freely available to researchers worldwide.

Clouds reflect or absorb heat depending on their composition. The AWARE data revealed that Antarctic clouds during the campaign had a stronger heat-trapping effect than previously assumed. Recent satellite observations of rapid loss of land ice from West Antarctica has been attributed to warm ocean water destabilizing ice shelves from below. This study demonstrates that melting at the surface of the ice sheet by a warm and moist atmosphere could become very important in the near future.

Strong westerly winds to the north of West Antarctica have previously been assumed to prevent anomalous atmospheric warming episodes (such as from El Nino) from influencing the Antarctic ice sheets. AWARE data challenges this idea. Based on ARM observations, researchers now see at the same time a strong remote influence of El Niño in driving warm air and moisture over West Antarctica. The data collected also supports the team’s hypothesis that in a changing climate warm air associated with, e.g., El Nino episodes, could become increasingly important as a mechanism able to drive Antarctic ice loss.

The AWARE science team is a collaboration of researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which led the study; Pennsylvania State University; Ohio State University and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The team’s new findings, based on AWARE’s unprecedented data set, are already helping researchers demystify Antarctica’s role in the global climate.

“In West Antarctica, we have a tug-of-war going on between the influence of El Niños and the westerly winds, and it looks like the El Niños are winning,” said study co-author David Bromwich, Ohio State University professor. “And because model simulations suggest that El Niños may amplify in the future with a warming climate, we should expect more surface melt events as we observed last year may occur in West Antarctica over the upcoming years.”

Funding: The Los Alamos work was funded by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Additional Reading:

Washington Post — Scientists stunned by Antarctic rainfall and a melt area bigger than Texas

ARM web feature: With ARM Instruments Watching, an Extensive Summer Melt in West Antarctica

News Release, The Ohio State University: Widespread snowmelt in West Antarctica during unusually warm summer

The greenhouse gas effects are very real

Research Study Raises New Concern About Global Warming

From an NPR Broadcast, “Here And Now,” WBUR, Boston, March 31, 2016

Photo: Ice floats on the surface of the sea in the western Antarctic peninsula, on March 05, 2016.

A study published in Nature says global warming could disintegrate the vast Antarctic ice sheet sooner than originally thought. That would mean a 3-foot sea level rise by the year 2100 and a 50-foot rise by the year 2500, something that would endanger coastal cities. Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson speaks with Richard Alley, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and one of the study’s co-authors.

Guest: Richard Alley, professor in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Antarctic Sea Ice Rapidly Disappearing

World faces narrow window to cut carbon emissions

From an Article by Amanda Reilly, E & E News, February 9, 2016

Humans have only a small window to zero out carbon dioxide emissions that could lead to changes affecting the globe for tens of thousands of years, according to new research published today.

The study in the journal Nature Climate Change warned that the climate change debate has focused on time frames that are too short, largely ignoring long-term changes to the ecology and geology of the world.

The only way to avert these long-term changes, the authors wrote, is by shaping a new energy system with net-zero or net-negative carbon dioxide emissions within the next few decades.

“Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years — and some of it will be there for more than 100,000 years,” Peter Clark, an Oregon State University paleo-climatologist and lead author, said today in a statement. “People need to understand that the effects of climate change on the planet won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations.”

Researchers from the United States, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, France, Australia and the United Kingdom participated in the study.

The authors contend that researchers and policymakers have overwhelmingly focused on relatively short-term shifts linked to climate change, changes in the last 150 years and their effects up to the year 2100. Using computer models, the research team projected how human actions will affect the globe over the next 10,000 years.

It found that humans have only a few decades to halt “potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”

“Our greenhouse gas emissions today produce climate-change commitments for many centuries to millennia. It is high time that this essential irreversibility is placed into the focus of policymakers,” said Thomas Stocker, a climate modeler at the University of Bern in Switzerland. “The long-term view sends the chilling message [about] what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era.”

The team predicted that sea levels will rise by 25 meters with warming of 2 degrees Celsius and 50 meters with warming of 7 C, over a time frame of the next several centuries to millennia. On the low end, 122 countries will see at least a tenth of their population affected by higher sea levels.

The latest report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that sea levels could rise by 1 meter by 2100.

“It takes sea-level rise a very long time to react — on the order of centuries,” Clark said. “It’s like heating a pot of water on the stove; it doesn’t boil for quite a while after the heat is turned on — but then it will continue to boil as long as the heat persists.”

According to the authors, studies that focus only on near-term risks, as well as the economic practice of discounting future climate impacts, tend to play down the future, more severe impacts.

While short-term emission reduction targets — such as the ones nations committed to in the recent Paris climate deal — are “important,” the authors said, only a “complete transformation” of the globe’s energy system within the next few decades will halt severe impacts. They called for a “fourth industrial revolution” entailing changes in energy, land use and agriculture.

“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren,” said Harvard University geology professor Daniel Schrag, a co-author of the study. “We need to think carefully about the long-term scales of what we are unleashing.”

>>> See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net