Greenland Atmospheric River Temporarily Slowed The Island's Inexorable Ice Cap Meltdown

A massive atmospheric river hit Greenland in March, 2022
and dumped so much snow that it temporarily  halted
the dangerous melting of its massive ice cap. 

As land-based glaciers melt and wilt under pressure from climate change, sea levels keep rising as a result . Long term, it's easily one of the biggest threats to us humans as the world warms. 

That's one of the reasons why climate scientists are obsessed with Greenland. There's a lot of ice up there, and the more it melts, the more the sea levels rise. 

 If all of Greenland's ice mass melts, which I admit won't happen anytime soon, global sea levels would rise by an average of 23 feet. 

Which would be absolutely devastating. Even a couple feet of rising seas would be a zillion dollar, life threatening, world-changing  mess. So you see why Greenland is important.

It's mostly bad news as big bits and pieces of Greenland's ice melts every year in the stew of a climate change summer  Because they are human, scientists do look for, ore at least vaguely celebrate, any piece of good news. 

They found one of those happy pieces of news in a massive atmospheric river that hit Greenland in 2022. 

I've told you about atmospheric rivers in past posts.  Those are those ribbons of high moisture air that come off oceans, hit land and dump often incredible amounts of rain or snow over a relatively narrow area.

In one sense, they're good, as they supply a lot of the needed moisture that the West Coast of the U.S. and other place need. But they're very often bad, causing intense flooding. 

The atmospheric river that scientist seized upon from 2022 turned out to be a good thing. 

Per Gizmodo:

"A research pair has investigated the recent impact of an intense atmospheric river - a channel of water vapor that brings moisture and heat from warmer oceans to colder regions - on Greenland's ice sheet. 

Unexpectedly, they found that this phenomenon deposit 16 billion tons of snow on Greenland, thought to temporarily slow its ice melt. As detailed in a study published March 3 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, atmospheric rivers might have a more positive impact than researchers had theorized.."

A positive impact, sure. But certainly not a cure-all.

The uber-snowy atmospheric rive that struck Greenland in March, 2022 slowed the island's yearly ice melt but didn't stop it. 

The Greenland ice sheet ultimately shrunk in 2022, just as it did for the previous 26 years and just as it did for the subsequent two.

But at least for now, atmospheric rivers might not always be the ice destruction events in Greenland scientists feared.  

The March, 2022 event suggests that Greenlandic atmospheric rivers could be snowy. Very, very snow. That buys just a bit of time in the Greenland ice melt derby. After all, the amount of snow that hit Greenland in that 2022 event boggles the mind. 

THE STORM

That same atmospheric river pummeled Svalbard, an island in the Arctic north of Norway with intense , highly unseasonable rain. 

Researchers who took samples and ice core readings after that epic atmospheric river found some surprising results in Greenland, as Gizmodo tells us:

"The ice core section revealed that the atmospheric river had brought 16 billion tons of snow to Greenland, single-handedly offsetting the ice sheet's yearly loss by 8 percent in just three days." An additional 4.5 billon tons of snow fell over the next few days as the atmospheric river slowly waned. 

Spring, 2022 in Greenland was otherwise unusually warm, so the atmospheric river prevented a LOT of potential ice melt. 

There's no guarantee, of course, that atmospheric rivers will bring welcome snow blitzes to Greenland. As the world continued to warm, a future March 22 mega snow could end up being a mega-rain.

Inches and inches and feet of rain on the Greenland ice cap would really set off a wave of melting that would dwarf any of the big melts we've seen up there in recent summers.  

Sea Levels Rising Faster Along Southern U.S. Coast Than Elsewhere

"Sunny day flooding" at high tides in Florida and the 
Gulf Coast are becoming more frequent as sea level
is rising much faster in the Gulf of Mexico than 
in most other places. 

 We all know sea levels worldwide are rising due to climate change. Glaciers are melting, ice is thawing in Greenland, parts of Antarctica are also seeing weird thaws.  

One thing that's not really intuitive is that sea levels don't rise at the same pace all over the world. Some places see faster rises, and in other places it's meh. 

This has to do with how fast the ocean is warming in a particular location, whether ocean currents are changing and whether land along the coast is actually sinking. 

Which brings us to the coastline of the South, mostly involving the Gulf of Mexico. 

A recent studies by has indicated that sea levels there really jumped ahead in recent years. Water levels along the Gulf Coast have risen by nearly five inches since 2010.  That's more than double the world wide average.

One of the studies was authored by Jianjun Yin, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona.

Five inches doesn't sound like much, but in flat coastal areas, it can mean a big difference. Especially during powerful storms. As the Washington Post explains: 

"Yin's study suggested that Hurricanes Michael and Ian, two of the strongest storms ever to hit the United States, were made considerably worse in part from additional sea level rise. 

'It turns out that the water level associated with Hurricane Ian was the highest on record due to the combined effect of sea-level rise and storm surge, ' Yin said." 

This will continue to be a problem as hurricanes inevitably keep smashing into the Gulf coastline and southeastern United States. Meanwhile, for some reason, people are still moving in droves to high risk places in the South. 

What happens when the water gets deeper. Some of these properties will end up below water. Or become so prone to storm damage that they lose their value. Which also means coastal cities will lose chunks of their tax bases.

Part of the problem with Gulf Coast sea level rise is that land along coastal areas in Texas and Louisiana have also been sinking. That hasn't been nearly a big a problem in most of Florida, but the rapid sea level rise in the Gulf still spells trouble for the Sunshine State.

The studies only go back a little more than a dozen years, so scientists still don't know if this rapid uptick is just a blip in geological time or a worsening long term trend. 

The Gulf of Mexico has warmed up a lot over the past decade. Warmer water expands, which could explain much the surge in Gulf water levels.  Climate change will keep putting upward pressure on water temperatures, but we don't know if the pace of that warming will stay the same as in recent years. 

The studies also indicate sea level rise is much faster than the worldwide average along the southeast Atlantic coast as far north as Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. 

Whatever happens, sea levels will keep rising for the foreseeable future worldwide at varying paces due to climate change. Some will have it worse than others, apparently. 

 

Antarctic "Doomsday Glacier" Label Is An Exaggeration, But Still A Big Problem For World.

They call it the "Doomsday Glacier" but how much is
this disintegrating ice shelf in Antarctica going to raise
sea levels. Could be a lot - eventually 

 Scientists are beginning to get a better handle on trouble with a so-called "Doomsday Glacier" In Antarctica that is falling apart a lot faster than climate experts would like. 

As the Associated Press tells us, polar scientist Britney Schmidt of Cornell University created a robot to poke around this glacier, whose real name is the Thwaites ice shelf. 

 Reports the Associated Press: 

"Before, scientists had no observations from this critical but hard to reach point on Thwaites. But with the robot named Icefin lowered down a slender 1,925 hole, they saw how important crevasses are in the fracturing of the ice, which takes the heaviest toll on the glacier even more than melting. 'That's how the glacier is falling apart. It's not thinning and going away. It shatters, said Schmidt, lead author of one of two studies in Nature."

That shattering accelerates the overall erosion of the ice shelf, scientist said.  

The glacier is about the size of Florida. People call it the Doomsday Glacier because if it all melts, global sea levels would rise by two feet, not including sea level rise from other sources. 

The good news is that it will take a few centuries for all of the Thwaites ice shelf to melt.  

On a geological scale, however, the changes with Thwaites are super rapid. Warmer water is eating away at the ice shelf from below. 

More from the AP:

"'Thwaites is a rapidly changing system, much more rapidly changing than we started this work five years ago, and even since we were in the field there years ago,' said Oregon State University ice researcher Erin Pettit."

Petitt wasn't part of the study mentioned above. But she continued:  "I am definitely expecting the rapid change to continue and accelerate over the next few years." 

More Bad Climate News: Frigid Top Of Greenland Isn't So Frigid Anymore

There's still an incredible amount of
ice in Greenland, but unfortunately.
recent studies suggest it is 
melting faster than first thought. 

 The top of Greenland's massive ice sheet is something like two miles above sea level. Given how high that is, and how far north it is, it's a frigid place. Thaws are rare, even in the summer. 

But even there, the climate change news is bad, as it seems to be everywhere. It's hotter up at the tippy top of Greenland than it's been in at least 1,000 years.  

Yes, yes, I know nobody was around to take the temperature of the Greenland ice cap 1,000 years ago, but scientists can still figure out how cold it was centuries ago.

As the Washington Post reports, that warmest in at least 1,000 years conclusion was reached by scientists  who looked at oxygen bubbles in ice taken from deep inside the ice sheet. '

The Washington Post tells us: 

"The samples allowed the researchers to construct a new temperature record based on the oxygen bubbler stored inside them, which reflect the temperature at a the time when the ice was originally laid down. '

'We find the 2001-2011 decade the warmest of the whole period o 1,000 years,' said Maria Horhold, the study's lead author and scientists at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany."

Warming has continued to ramp up since 2011, so the study's findings are probably underestimating how much the climate in Greenland has changed, the Washington Post reports. 

As I've said several times in this blog thingy, what goes on in Greenland doesn't stay in Greenland. Obviously, when any ice up there melts, it eventually flows into the Atlantic Ocean. This contributes to global sea level rises. 

If all of Greenland's ice melts, worldwide sea levels would rise by 20 feet. Obviously, the entire Greenland ice cap won't completely melt anytime soon. But any sea level rise, is bad, considering that melting glaciers around the world, and never mind all that ice thawing in Antarctica is feeding into the oceans, too. 

The warming at that high altitude top of the Greenland ice cap will eventually introduce a nasty feedback loop. 

Part of the reason why the ice cap over millennia has maintained itself is it's so high up. The higher you go, the colder the atmosphere is. That's why you have snow capped mountains in the summer if said mountains are high enough. 

But as the top of Greenland's ice cap melts, its surface will inevitably be at lower and lower elevations. So you end up combining increased temperatures from global warming with higher temperature for simply being at a lower altitude. The rate of melting would then increase for two reasons, not just one.

Climate denialists will note that at some point this winter, it was 65 degrees below zero at a station in Greenland. Yes, that's damn cold. But something called "winter" is going on. Greenland is a frigid place, and climate change has not altered that. 

All the warming we're talking about occurs in the summer. It's chilly in Greenland at the height of July, too, as we already explained. But those thaws are getting more and more disconcerting. 

  

Oh, Great! Another Climate Change Monster: "Zombie Ice"

"Zombie ice" from Greenland is
yet another in a long and growing 
list of threats created by
climate change. 

 The characters in "The Walking Dead" are scary, but at least they aren't real, so we're good, right?

Maybe not. The zombie apocalypse isn't upon us, but a "zombie" from Greenland poses real trouble.  

A study released in August warns us of "zombie ice."

No, the Abominable Snowman is not going to come down and eat your brains. Instead, the zombie ice is going to eventually flood your favorite coastal town.

According to the Associated Press, Greenland zombie ice is:

"....doomed ice that, while still attached to thicker areas of ice, is no longer getting replenished by parent glaciers now receiving less snow. Without replenishment, the doomed ice is melting from climate change and will inevitably raise seas, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. 

'It's dead ice. It's just going to melt and disappear from the ice sheet,' Colgan said in an interview. 'This ice has been consigned to the ocean, regardless of what climate (emissions) scenario we take now.'"

This whole thing makes projections of how much Greenland will contribute to sea level rise worse. Previously scientists thought the current rate of Greenland melt would, on average, raise global sea levels by five inches.

But if you take into consideration the "zombie ice," we're talking something like ten inches. 

That doesn't sound like much, really, but it does make a big difference. Many coastal areas are pretty flat, and a modest increase in sea levels can bring water pretty far inland. Plus, if you add ten inches to the storm surges associated with hurricanes and powerful coastal storms like nor'easters, you can add a lot of damage to what would have already occurred with the storm.

Already, in some parts of the world, including many coastlines in the United States, sea level rise has caused an increasing number of sunny weather coastal floods. Those occasions are when the tug of the moon creates higher tides. That never used to be a problem, but the higher moon tides, combined with the now higher sea levels, creates minor but still nuisance coastal floods

These take the form of flooded streets, water surrounding coastal cottages and salty water infiltrating aquifers.

When I started reading the article, the problem I had is, OK, ten inches of sea level rise....when??

The study says "within this century" but doesn't seem to be more precise than that. Scrolling down the AP article does provide some context:

"Time is the key unknown here and a bit of a problem with the study, said two outside ice scientists, Leigh Stearns of the University of Kansas and Sophie Nowicki of the University of Buffalo. The researchers in the study said they couldn't estimate the timing of the committed melting, yet in the last sentence they mentions, 'within this century' without supporting it, Stearns said."

Colgan acknowledged he's hazy on the timing. It depends on how many years are especially warm. The year 2012, and to a lesser extent 2019, were bad melt years in Greenland. Huge amounts of ice were lost as water to the oceans.

Those years were pretty abnormal, but Colgan points out that years that seem normal would have been really abnormally warm half a century ago.  

This study, of course, is just one piece of the puzzle. On a larger scale, climate "tipping points" loom if the world continues to warm, even just a little bit more.

Zombie ice will raise sea levels some. Factor in all the other reasons why climate change will raise sea levels, and you can see why coastal areas area in real trouble. 

 

 

Weird Antarctic Heat Wave Might Not Directly Affect Us, But Scientists Are Freaked Out

Scientists at the Concordia station in Antarctica recently
dressed for the beach as temperatures shattered previous
all-time records for heat. It wasn't the tropical paradise
depicted in the photo. That record smashing high 
temperature was 10 degrees above zero. 

  As frigid Antarctic heads into their even more bone chilling autumn, a strange heat wave earlier this month  has shocked scientists. 

Temperatures on the eastern Antarctic ice sheet were 50 to 70 degrees above normal. Scientists on site even stripped down to shorts and t-shirts or no shirts outdoors to mark the unprecedented event, the Washington Post reported.

The departures from normal were likely the largest recorded on Earth.

It wasn't exactly a tropical vacation, however. This is the most frigid part of the globe and temperatures in much of the area affected by the extreme Antarctic "heat" stayed well below freezing.

For instance, the Russian observatory Vostok, just 808 miles from the South Pole and 11,444 feet above sea level so is frigid. In March, the average high temperature there is a gelid 63 below zero Fahrenheit. In the record heat wave this month, Vostok hit an even 0 degrees Fahrenheit, which shattered the previous March record high by 27 degrees, the Washington Post reported. 

The ever so slightly Concordia Research Station in Antarctica reached 10 degrees above zero during the hot spell, which was the all-time hottest temperature there. The old record was 7 degrees and the normal high temperature in March at Concordia is 56 below, says the Washington Post. 

Remember, this is March, so Antarctica is past their summer, so to speak. 

Still these readings really are unheard of.  For perspective, when we have record heat in Vermont, temperatures are usually 20 or 30 degrees above normal. If temperatures were 70 degrees above normal in Burlington today,  The hottest it's ever been in Burlington is 101 degrees.   

Temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctic often get further above and below normal than in places in the mid latitudes, like here in Vermont. In those places, readings can be 30 or 40 degrees above or below normal with some regularity at the poles.

But 70 above normal is not something scientists have seen. Even at or near the Earth's poles. 

Caused by atmospheric river, a narrow corridor of very warm, wet air that came inland from the Pacific Ocean near Antarctica.   Despite the exceptional warmth, and some rain, it was not toasty enough to cause significant ice melt.  Had this occurred earlier in the Antarctic "summer" the melt would have been worse, the Washington Post notes. 

At least a large portion of this odd heat was probably just a random event.  But it was so extreme that scientists are still very concerned.  Especially since "unprecedented" heat waves keep popping up around the globe. 

Jonathan Wille, a researcher studying polar meteorology at Grenoble Alpes University in France told the Washington Post, comparing an unprecedented heat wave in the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada last June, and the heat wave that just hit Antarctica.  that the heat wave

"...was something that wasn't thought to be possible until it actually happened. It was never observed before, and the atmospheric patterns that led to it happening were just not thought to be possible either until it happens. And that's what's basically happened here over Antarctica."

IT'S COMPLICATED

Antarctica, seemingly a vast, frozen and still place, has a lot of moving parts. With climate change looming,  many of these shifting pieces worry scientists. 

It's not just heat waves that melt Antarctic ice from above that you need to worry about. 

Even if surface areas in large parts of Antarctica stay cold enough such that not much melts, ocean water that is slightly warmer than it used to be can sneak beneath the ice shelves floating on the water and clinging to the edges of the continent. 

This can enable the ice shelves to melt from below, eventually weakening them or even breaking them up.  With the ice shelves out of the picture, glaciers on Antarctica's land are more free to flow faster into the water, where they will melt and raise sea level s globally. 

There's one ice shelf in particular, called Thwaites, that is already showing signs of instability. If it goes, a glacier behind it would move quickly (at least relatively so for a glacier) into the ocean.  If, theoretically just that one glacier were to entirely melt, global sea levels would rise by a little more than two feet. Not good. 

What you might call summer in Antarctica is about to end, and climate scientists might be especially grateful for that this year. 

Sea ice extent around Antarctica reached its lowest level since the first starting keeping track of it back in 1979.

That sounds like a sure sign that climate change is asserting itself, but in the case of Antarctica, not really. Or at least we don't know. 

The Guardian helps us sort out this year's lack of Antarctic sea ice as follows:

"Dr. Walt Meier, a senior research scientist with the NSIDC, said it coincided with strong wins over part of the Ross Sea that had pulled ice to the north, where it melted in warmer waters or was broken up by waves.

This pushed the sea ice extent - the area of the ocean covered by at least 15 percent floating ice - to below the previous record set in 2017. But scientists expressed caution about attributing the retreat to the increase in global temperatures linked to greenhouse gas emissions."

Unlike the Arctic, which has really been losing over the past couple of decades, Antarctica has been all over the place.

Antarctic sea ice extent had been often setting record highs up through 2014, but in the past eight years it's been generally declining.  That's too short a time to conclusively pin the blame on climate change. 

The best that scientists can say is "maybe." According to the Guardian:

"Dr. Will Hobbs, who studies Antarctic sea ice with the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, said the latest record was significant. There had been an expectation that after the record low of 2017 the ice would recover he said. 

'But now we have these two events in five years that are off the records,' he said. 'You can't say this is climate change, but we do now have to consider whether or not the system is starting to change.'"

The reason why we care about sea ice at the bottom of the world is that it helps keep the massive Antarctic ice cap in place. Lose the sea ice, and the Antarctic ice cap starts melting and sliding off into the sea.  Let that go on too much and global sea levels rise dramatically.  

The sea level is already going up at a faster pace than it did just decades ago and it's going to get fastest yet, and soon, as I reported back on February 15.

So yeah, climate scientists are really interested in what's going on in Antarctica.  There's plenty of research going on. .

Here's an example, according to According to Vox: 

"New research finds that some of the most profound changes to Earth's ice are largely invisible because they're happening far beneath the surface. Land ice and ice shelves are wearing thin from below and it's happening much faster than previously expected."

The chilly air above the South Pole tends to keep ice frozen from above and around its edges. But deep Antarctic waters aren't quite as frigid. 'At a depth in the Southern Ocean, there is a tremendous amount of heat energy below a few hundred meters down' said (British Antarctic Survey geophysicist Robert Larter). This warmer water can then come into contact with the underside of ice shelves, causing them to melt. 

The water in question is barely above freezing. However, if it warms up just a bit, that can make a big difference. 

There's a LOT we don't know about Antarctica, and how what happens there is related to climate change. We do know that what happens in Antarctica doesn't necessarily stay in Antarctica. Yeah, it's a distant, unpopulated place. But with climate change, it's still a place that can come back to bite us.