The all-women science team from The Ohio State University (see article link at bottom of this entry - thank you), from left, Kay Lindsay, Terry Tickhill Terrell, Lois Jones and Eilenn McSaveney in Christchurch, New Zealand, before heading down to Antarctica in 1969. Jones and Lindsay have since passed away.
The Antarctic ice sheet and sea-level (click on link below figure)
The intense cold of the Antarctic ice sheet is a major component of the global climate system through its influence on surface energy and moisture fluxes, clouds, precipitation, and atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and the ice sheet contains enough water mass to raise global sea level by nearly 60 m. The ice sheet is nourished by snowfall and loses mass by iceberg discharge and melt from the base of floating ice shelves around the coast. Any imbalance between these input and output mass terms affects global sea level.
Australian scientists have studied this ice sheet mass budget since the International Geophysical Year (1957/58), collecting detailed data on ice flow, ice thickness and other ice sheet characteristics on over-snow tralaverses. These have penetrated deep into the interior of Antarctica, and along more than 5000 km of the coastal perimeter (Figure 1). These observations alone are insufficient to accurately estimate the state of balance of the ice sheet, but they do provide the essential information to calibrate and validate new satellite measurements of the ice sheet and assist in developing numerical models of the ice sheet....
The significance of this recent finding places the Antarctica Ice Sheets at a 'gross loss' of 'ice balance.' In otherwords, in the 1990s the 'loss' was approximatly 15% of the accumulation (gain). Now, the loss is greater than the gain. That occurred in about one decade. That is a lot of deterioration in a very short period of time.
Photo: Budd and Warner
The tracking of the East Antarctica Icesheet has been going on for some time now. This study shows areas along the ice sheet weakened and eroded since the 1990s. The tracking is from minimally the 1950s when the glaciers of Antarctica were healthy and very, very frozen.
The Antarctic ice sheet and sea-level (click here)
November 24, 2009
0300 PM
Antarctica Temperature Map
East Antarctica Icesheet is the area to the right of the picture. WAIS (West Antarctica Ice Sheet) is to the left upper corner.
This is a first. It is a tipping point. It is hugely important. East Antarctica is where a terminus to the Lambert Glacier is as well as other large ice structures on the continent. This is not good news.
World's biggest ice sheet is melting (click title to entry - thank you)
ANDREW DARBYNovember 24, 2009
THE world's largest frozen water mass, the East Antarctic ice sheet, has been found for the first time to be losing ice at an increased rate.
For years scientists have worried about the smaller West Antarctic ice sheet's net melt, and some recent studies reported that the eastern sheet was growing slightly, due to snowfall.
Now a paper based on satellite measurements shows coastal regions of the East Antarctic, including long stretches of the Australian Antarctic Territory, have been losing ice for the past three years.
Study leader Jianli Chen concluded in the British journal Nature Geoscience: ''As a whole, Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea level rise.''
So far the loss of ice from the East Antarctic sheet - although huge in scale at about 57 billion tonnes each year - is tiny in terms of its effect on sea level....
The 'stupid talk' of the moment would come from Republicans and Wall Street seeking to look into their financial futures as if they will be alive to enjoy the moment by stating, "This is a huge improvement in obtaining natural resources from the most southern continent."
No different than the navigators that see a Northern Sea Route over the North Pole as a viable solution to fuel economy.
It is VERY 'stupid talk.'
The only people with enough ignorance to 'play with Climate' as if it is their's to play with are Wall Street people and USA Republicans.
They simply aren't that bright.
Or.
Moral.
It is all part of "The God Complex" these PEOPLE have. They aren't able to 'occupy seats of power' without hubris and feelings of entitlement. They don't see their role in their profession as 'service to others' while enjoying the capacity a 'seat of power' provides.
That is what makes 'Bonuses' so dangerous to economies. They provide false incentives to the 'power' rather than 'the service.'
Capitalism when 'limited' to a few 'seats of power' is exploitive and the heirarchy of authority within that power structure is lost to the most 'vulnerable' within that structure. It is why environmental laws are 'absolute.' They have to be. They have to be based in solid and irrefutable science, because, the laws and law makers will be assaulted by the power structures that exploit.
What does Wall Street and Republicans have to do with the degradation and Climate Danger of the melting of the East Antarctica Ice Sheet?
Do I have to answer that?
Why 'answer' to 'stupid talk' at all?
Why reduce the brilliance of the scientists within this 'warning' of reporting to 'politics of the moment.' They weren't playing politics in any moment when they studied the ice sheet and reported their findings.
Politics doesn't belong in science, except, for fiscal appropriations to its dearly needed support. Science provides economy a platform for the future and direction to their investment, NOT, the other way around.
Oh, wait. The great wisdom of the Media speaks. What does it say? Oh, really? We should all seek to visit every American's viscera. Gotcha. What a great idea that is, huh? Visceral stupid talk. Sure, that sounds like something we should base an economy on. What an insult to women Palin and Dowd are. I mean for real here. Visceral. Sure, let's all be terrified of everything in life and make a party statment as well.
I DON'T THINK SO !!
Op-Ed Columnist
Visceral Has Its Value (click here)
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: November 21, 2009
...She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls.
The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax....
Does the world recognize the gender of the scientist that discovered 'Ozone Layer Deterioration?' It was a woman. A woman scientist in Antarctica.
Breaking the ice
First U.S. female scientists enter Antarctic history in 1969 (click here)
By Peter Rejcek, Antarctic Sun Editor
Posted November 13, 2009
Terry Tickhill Terrell was a 19-year-old undergraduate student at The Ohio State University — a chemistry major dissatisfied with the prospect of spending her career in drab laboratories — when she learned about a job opening on a science expedition to Antarctica.
She walked into the then-Institute of Polar Studies at the university and announced that she wanted to go to Antarctica. Silent stares greeted her announcement.
That was 1969. The year of Woodstock and Neil Armstrong taking the first steps on the moon. But women didn’t go to Antarctica.
All that was about to change....
