SEARCH
A great gift
for crisis deniers!
Humoring the Horror of the
Converging Emergencies
94 color pages
$24.99 now $15!
Or read FREE online!
Twitter
Ping this story
in social media:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
NowPublic
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Greenland, West Antarctic Ice Caps Melting At Half The Speed Previously Predicted http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1284044400
The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, shows a team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Nature Geoscience.
The melting of the ice caps has been charted since 2002 using the measurements produced by the two GRACE satellites. From space they detect small changes in the Earth's gravitational field and these changes are related to the exact distribution of mass on Earth, including ice and water. When ice melts and lands in the sea, this therefore has an effect on the gravitational field.
Based on this principle, previous estimates for the Greenland ice cap calculated that the ice was melting at a rate of 230 giga-tons per year (i.e. 230,000 billion kg), which would result in an average rise in global sea levels of around 0.75 mm a year. For West Antarctica, the estimate was 132 giga-tons per year.
However, it now turns out that these results were not properly corrected for glacial isostatic adjustment, the phenomenon that the Earth's crust rebounds as a result of the melting of the massive ice caps from the last major Ice Age around 20,000 years ago. These movements of the Earth's crust have to be incorporated in the calculations, since these vertical movements change the Earth's mass distribution and therefore also have an influence on the gravitational field.
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
[Read more stories about:
melting glaciers, arctic meltdown, rising sea level]
|
 |
|
New!:
| |
|
Your Quips:
Byron says: "Falling off a cliff at half the speed we thought is called "recovery"? You guys really are bleak!"
| |
|
Got a PaniQuip?
|
|
|
We reserve the
right to reuse, remove, or refuse any entry.
| |
|
|
'Doc Jim says:
|
|
|
 |
|
Finally, science proves that science is wrong.
|
|
|
|
|
Want to explore more?
Try the PaniCloud!
|
