↓
 
Home→Tags oceans - Page 33 1 2 … 31 32 33 34 35 36

Tag Archives: oceans

PLEA Network

9 December 2015, Climate News Network, Ice melt highlights Inuit plight. COP21: As Arctic peoples’ leaders appeal for unity to halt global warming, scientists report that Greenland’s glaciers are now melting at a speed not seen since the last Ice Age. The glaciers of Greenland are retreating two to three times faster now than at any time since the last Ice Age ended 9,500 years ago, according to new research. The news comes as indigenous peoples from the northern polar region staged anArctic Day at the COP21 climate change summit in Paris. Leaders of Greenland peoples, the Nunavut region of Canada and the Inuit Circumpolar Council appealed to the governments of the world to unite to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep global warming to between 1.5˚C and 2˚C. That is because the Arctic is now warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, and both human settlements and natural ecosystems are vulnerable. That the Greenland glaciers are in retreat is itself not news. Satellite data and measurements on the ground have repeatedly confirmed the retreat of the glaciers, the loss of ice and the acceleration of flow. The Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier has even reached a speed of 17 kilometres a year. Sediment cores But US scientists report in Climate of the Past journal that the present rate of loss is without precedent. Read More here

 

PLEA Network

2 December 2015, New Scientist, Massive El Niño sweeping globe is now the biggest ever recorded. The current extreme El Niño is now the strongest ever recorded, smashing the previous record from 1997-8. Already wreaking havoc on weather around the world, the new figures mean those effects will probably get worse. Climate change could be to blame and is known to be making the extreme impacts of El Niño on weather more likely. The 1997-8 El Niño killed 20,000 people and caused almost $97 billion of damage as floods, droughts, fires, cyclones and mudslides ravaged the world. Now the current El Niño has surpassed the 1997-8 El Niño on a key measure, according to the latest figures released by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency. El Niño occurs when warm water that has piled up around Australia and Indonesia spills out east across the Pacific Ocean towards the Americas, taking the rain with it. A key measure of its intensity is the warmth of water in the central Pacific. In 1997, at its peak on 26 November, it was 2.8 °C above average. According to the latest measurements, it reached 2.8 °C on 4 November this year, and went on to hit 3.1 °C on 18 November – the highest temperatures ever seen in this region. Read More here

PLEA Network

18 November 2015, Science Daily, Sea level rise from Antarctic collapse may be slower than suggested. A new study by scientists in the UK and France has found that Antarctic ice sheet collapse will have serious consequences for sea level rise over the next two hundred years, though not as much as some have suggested. This study, published today in the journal Nature, uses an ice-sheet model to predict the consequences of unstable retreat of the ice, which recent studies suggest has begun in West Antarctica. Scientists, led by Catherine Ritz from Université Grenoble Alpes in France and Tamsin Edwards from The Open University, predict that the contribution is most likely to be 10 cm of sea-level rise this century under a mid to high climate scenario, but is extremely unlikely to be higher than 30 cm. When combined with other contributions, that’s a significant challenge for adapting to future sea level rise. But it’s also far lower than some previous estimates, which were as high as one metre from Antarctica alone. The study’s central estimate raises the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) central prediction of 60 cm global sea-level rise by just a few centimetres under the mid to high scenario they used. But the UK and France team’s method allowed them to assess the likelihood of sea-level rise from substantial parts of the ice sheet collapsing, which the IPCC could not due to a lack of evidence. They predict there is a one in twenty chance that Antarctic collapse could contribute more than 30 cm sea-level rise by the end of the century and more than 72 cm by 2200. This does not rule out larger contributions on longer time scales. Read More here

PLEA Network

14 November 2015, Climate News Network, Greenland glaciers’ melting speeds up again. The increasing rate at which Greenland’s glaciers are melting this century has confounded polar scientists.  A massive Greenland glacier that holds enough water to raise sea levels by half a metre is melting at speed, according to a new study. The Zachariae Isstrom in northeast Greenland has entered a phase of accelerated retreat, and is losing mass at the rate of 5 billion metric tons a year, according to US scientists. They report in the journal Science that a succession of aerial surveys combined with multiple satellite observations has established that the base of the glacier is being eroded rapidly by a mix of warmer ocean water and increasing amounts of meltwater from the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. “North Greenland glaciers are changing rapidly,” said Jeremie Mouginot, an earth system scientist at the University of California, Irvine, who led the study. “The shape and dynamics of the Zachariae Isstrom have changed dramatically over the last few years. The glacier is now breaking up and calving high volumes of icebergs into the ocean, which will result in rising sea levels for decades to come.” Read More here

↑