Ice melting! Rising sea levels! Polar bears drowning! Ice shelves falling into the ocean! All because of man made green house gases.
These are some of the scary scenes in the Academy Award winning Al Gore movie, "An Inconvenient Truth".
It opend my eyes and made me do a little research to see if all of this is true.
What better place to start than the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It looks and sounds like it is the official keeper of the ice stats.
These two charts show that the ice is growing in the Antarctic and shrinking in the Arctic. Very interesting. There sure were a lot of scenes of the ice in Antarctica melting.
Ice sure does melt in the Antarctic and then sure enough it freezes up again. You can actually watch an animation of the freezing and the melting and sea how dynamic it all is. This is a great page where you can go back to 1979 and see where the ice was in the Arctic and Antarctic month by month. As you can see, over the past 30 years the ice has actually expanded in Antarctica.
In Al Gore's Academy Award winning movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" two items about polar ice were presented.
- Ice in the Arctic is getting thinner
- Ice shelfs off of Antartica are falling into the sea.
I stumbled upon a few articles about undersea volcanoes. Did you know that very little is known about them? Did you know that they found one down in Antarctica very close to the crumbling Larsen Ice Shelf?
New volcano under the ice in Antarctica.
Indirect evidence suggests that volcanic activity occurring beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet influences ice flow and sheet stability. However, only volcanoes that protrude through the ice sheet and those inferred from geophysical techniques have been mapped so far...Ongoing volcanic heat production may have implications for contemporary ice dynamics in this glacial system.
How about a volcano under the ice in Antarctica erupted 2000 years ago and blew a hole through the ice.
"The discovery of a 'subglacial' volcanic eruption from beneath the Antarctic ice sheet is unique in itself. ...We believe this was the biggest eruption in Antarctica during the last 10,000 years. It blew a substantial hole in the ice sheet, and generated a plume of ash and gas that rose around 12 km into air."
Could it be undersea volcanoes that are creating the warmer ocean currents in the area of the melting ice? If a volcano blew through the ice 2000 years ago, is there a chance that it could happen again? I don't think that we can prevent a volcano from erupting so how are we going to deal with all of the ice melting and falling into the ocean? Should we spend our resources preparing for rising oceans or spend them chasing after reductions in green house gases that aren't going to do a thing about volcanoes? It's kind of important to really know the cause of a problem before you waste a lot of time and money trying to fix it.
How about that thinnig Arctic ice? Would you believe that they recently found a lot of undersea volcanic activity under the ice in the Arctic Ocean?
Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes
"Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice.
They returned with images and data showing that red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth and blown the tops off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometres below the ice. "Jets or fountains of material were probably blasted one, maybe even two, kilometres up into the water," says geophysicist Robert Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who led the expedition.
"The scale and magnitude of the explosive activity that we're seeing here dwarfs anything we've seen on other mid-ocean ridges," says Sohn, who studies ridges around the world. The volume of gas and lava that appears to have blasted out of the Gakkel volcanoes is "much, much higher" than that seen at other ridges.
The scientists say the heat released by the explosions is not contributing to the melting of the Arctic ice, but Sohn says the huge volumes of CO2 gas that belched out of the undersea volcanoes likely contributed to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. How much, he couldn't say.
In a radio interview of one of the researchers on the Arctic volcano expedition, he summed up the surprising findings as showing him how little we really know about what's going on around the earth.
You know the conventional wisdom had it that this kind of explosive activity was not possible on a mid-ocean ridge at 4000 meters water depth, because the basalts were not supposed to have enough carbon dioxide or enough volatiles to be able to explode, these really tremendous you know hydrostatic pressures that you experience there you know 2 miles or more under water. So we have this question okay, well, now we've seen that it is possible, it did happen and so what do you do with that information. Well, you have to ask yourself, well what we do we really know about how much carbon-dioxide is being fluxed through these mid-ocean ridges, you know, deep under water where we really have very limited ability to observe and immediately you have to kind of admit that we have based our assessment of how much carbon dioxide is coming out on very limited observations.
How much do we know about undersea volcanoes? From my limited reading, it seems like we don't know very much at all. Is the earth actually belching out CO2 from the rifts in the ocean floor? How would we ever be able to stop that? Could volcanoes under the ice in the Arctic be thinning the ice sheet? It sure sounds like it would be worth it to find out more.
If these climatic changes are being caused mostly by uncontrollable natural processes, it sure makes you approach the problem differently. You can't stop an earthquake but you can build buildings to withstand them better. If we can't stop the ocean from rising we better start packing our SUVs and moving to higher ground. Either that or study how Venice coped with it.
Part 1 of my Global Warming Series
Part 2 Is there really a consensus?
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