As Glaciers Melt, Scientists Seek New Data on Rising Seas

[dtotire]

As Glaciers Melt, Scientists Seek New Data on Rising Seas
By JUSTIN GILLIS
Published: November 13, 2010

TASIILAQ, Greenland — With a tense pilot gripping the stick, the helicopter hovered above the water, a red speck of machinery lost in a wilderness of rock and ice.

To the right, a great fjord stretched toward the sea, choked with icebergs. To the left loomed one of the immense glaciers that bring ice from the top of the Greenland ice sheet and dump it into the ocean.

Hanging out the sides of the craft, two scientists sent a measuring device plunging into the water, between ice floes. Near the bottom, it reported a temperature of 40 degrees. It was the latest in a string of troubling measurements showing that the water was warm enough to melt glaciers rapidly from below.

“That’s the highest we’ve seen this far up the fjord,” said one of the scientists, Fiammetta Straneo.

The temperature reading was a new scrap of information in the effort to answer one of the most urgent — and most widely debated — questions facing humanity: How fast is the world’s ice going to melt?

Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.


more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/science/earth/14ice.html?_r=1&hp

[postulater]

1. There was a show about the Dust Bowl last night.

Ten years of drought and dust. People dying from the dust clogging their lungs. There was no escape from the fine particles. One man reported sitting in his classroom and not being able to make out the facial features of classmates sitting across the room.

I imagine there were people who thought that god did this to them. Maybe they felt they deserved it, because they were sinners. Maybe that is why it lasted so long.

But one man, a SOIL SCIENTIST(!) appointed by FDR to address the problem (sorry I forgot his name), recognized that there were things that could be done about it.

Despite the stories from the plains, Congress refused to address the issue until there was a particularly horrible dust storm that swept dust from Canada down across all of the plains and across from Oklahoma to the East Coast.

This SCIENTIST(!) made it a point to be addressing Congress as the storm was approaching Washington. An aide kept him informed of the progress of the storm cloud and he kept talking until the cloud reached the Capitol building. So when the cloud covered the Capitol and darkened the sky, he pointed up and told Congress that it was time to do something.

Congress acted, the SCIENTIST(!) took his show on the road to the plains with federal money and began soil conservation projects that reversed the soil loss within two to three years. The rains came back and the dust settled.

Regardless of whether god is doing it or we are doing it, the point is that there are changes happening that we can monitor and measure. When we can measure things we can predict changes. When those changes are undesirable, we can use SCIENCE to help us decide what to do about them. Then we can do things that make life better for us.

Or we can decide that god planned it to be the way it will be and we should not mess with God's plan.

I prefer to think that god wants us to be SCIENTISTS, because (s)he feels proud when we show our intelligence.

[XemaSab]

2. You should check out the book "The Worst Hard Time."

Really, really horrific what Americans went through during the Dust Bowl.