Glacial Melt, Sea Level Rise Redefining Geography - Scotsman

[hatrack]

EDIT

Rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks - "lonely mountains" in Inuit - that were encased in the margins of Greenland's ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands. "We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon - of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it - is a real common phenomenon now."

With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now the new maps are becoming obsolete almost as soon as they are created. The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.

Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Centre of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year. "That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Boggild said. He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometres away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometres."

The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. The melting of tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, has doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up.

EDIT

http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=108132007

[XemaSab]

1. Do you know of any good maps

that would show a 23-foot rise in sea level and what California would look like?

Thanks.

[hatrack]

2. I'm sorry, I'm just getting ready to go out

I'll scratch around this evening and see if I can find anything.

:toast:

[XemaSab]

3. ok

thanks. :)

[Terran]

4. Here's a fairly good site

http://geongrid.geo.arizona.edu/arcims/website/slrus48prvi/viewer.htm

Allows you to see the effects of different levels of rise, 1-6 meters (6 being close to the figure mentioned in the article). SoCal is hardly effected; the Bay Area is in trouble. Worst by far is the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

[XemaSab]

7. Good stuff

Looks like the Delta region in California is totally hosed.

Thanks.

[Porcupine]

10. Sacramento loses it's downtown.

.

[XemaSab]

13. They've got huge concrete levees

Hey, they protected NOLA, right? :P

/tasteless

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

5. I looked for you

and found this:

http://www.clockwk.com/waterworld/

[XemaSab]

6. Cool!

I wonder what the southwest would look like. Yuma is at 152 feet above sea level, so I wonder what kind of sea level rise could totally re-inundate the Salton Sea.

Good times.

[GreenPartyVoter]

9. 150m is intense. I don't think I have seen any other maps

that use such a high number. I wish the maps were bigger, I can see that my house is underwater but can't tell if my brother would be okay out on the western side of the state in the foothills or not.

[htuttle]

11. They aren't asserting that particular scenario would ever happen

The page says that they were wondering if all the glacial ice on the planet melted (an unlikely event), would there be enough water to create a 'waterworld', like in the movie. The answer was apparently no -- if both icecaps completely melted, you'd see a 150 meter rise in sea levels, but no more. There's still a considerable amount of land left.

Nonetheless, it does give you a good idea of the general areas that will be lost when the oceans do end up rising 20m or so (a far more likely event).

[GreenPartyVoter]

12. I wish Google maps went up to 20m. They stop at 14m.

[kestrel91316]

8. I don't think there would be much change anywhere but SF Bay.

[XemaSab]

14. Santa Barbara is on low ground

So is quite a bit of LA, Santa Cruz, Eureka/Arcata... lots of communities along the coast.