On Heard Island (Southern Ocean) Glaciers Melting, Temps Higher, Rising Seas Split Peninsula

[hatrack]

THE pace of change is heating up in Australia's barometer of polar global warming. The latest bulletin from Heard Island in the Southern Ocean says temperatures are up, rapid retreat of glaciers continues unabated, and a peninsula has been split by the sea to create a new island.

Every few years Australian scientists have a chance to measure wholesale changes to volcanic Heard, which lies 2200 nautical miles south-west of Perth. In the most recent visit on board Aurora Australis last month they confirmed that automatic weather stations on Heard recorded a 1.3-degree temperature rise. One of the island's big glaciers, Brown, retreated 1.2 kilometres between 1947 and 2004, and there is reason to believe that today the pace is just as fast.

On a two-day stop at Heard, Australian Antarctic Division helicopters swept the island for video and still images to record the changing landscape. They also took in the island's seal life. "The team noticed that melt lagoons at the foot of the glaciers appear to be larger than when they were last mapped," said Ewan McIvor of the division. "Over 50 years there has been a retreat of total ice cover at Heard from 80 per cent of the island, to 70 per cent."

He said that what immediately stood out was a new one-kilometre-long island formed when the sea inundated a 10-kilometre peninsula known as Elephant Spit.

EDIT

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/global-warming/seeing-heard-is-believing-in-global-warming/2009/01/16/1231608986648.html