It was recently suggested that the amount of Antarctic ice has been growing in volume. Now comes news of glacial shrinkage that has the British Antarctic Survey worried: they say it could lead to a significant rise in global sea levels.
It was only a few days ago that I posted Being Economical With The Truth, in which I discussed how Christopher Booker, writing in Telegraph Online, pooh-poohed the recent findings about 2007′s Arctic sea ice summer shrinkage because, in the ensuing winter months, it’s expanded again to previous winter coverage. What I didn’t include in my post was his further assertion that, according to a graph recently published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) titled “Southern Hemisphere Ice”, Antarctic ice has expanded in recent years, well above its 30-year mean — further proof, he thinks, that all the guff about global warming is nonsense.
However, research conducted in part by the University of Bristol and recently published in Nature Geoscience (to which I referred in my January 14th post Antarctic Ice Loss Confirmed) refuted this — it said increasing amounts of ice mass have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years. I guess that leaves Mr. Booker out in the cold, so to speak.
And now further research from another authoritative source shows that a number of huge Antarctic glaciers are giving cause for concern because of the speed with which they’re rushing headlong into the ocean.
The British Antarctic Survey has recently had a group of scientists camped out on a collection of West Antarctica glaciers — what BAS scientist David Vaughan described as the weak underbelly of the West Antarctic ice sheet — in a remote part of the continent. The glaciers cover an area the size of Texas, and their findings show that they’re slipping more swiftly towards the ocean than ever previously recorded.
According to satellite measurements, three of the huge glaciers in this area have been speeding up for more than a decade. The biggest of them, the Pine Island Glacier, or the PIG, is causing the most concern. Julian Scott, who’s just returned from the region, told the BBC: “This is a very important glacier; it’s putting more ice into the sea than any other glacier in Antarctica. It’s a couple of kilometres (1.2 miles) thick, it’s 30km (18.6 miles) wide and it’s moving at 3.5km (2.2 miles) per year, so it’s putting a lot of ice into the ocean.”
The team drove skidoos over the ice for thousands of kilometres taking measurements as they went, using radar and boreholes. The last time this area was visited by scientists was in 1961. More recently, satellites have been used to track changes. According to those measurements, the glacier was accelerating by around 1% a year throughout the 1990s. Julian Scott’s sensational finding this season is that “The measurements from last season seem to show an incredible acceleration, a rate of up to 7%. That is far greater than the accelerations they were getting excited about in the 1990s.”
The reason for this sudden acceleration does not seem to be warming in the surrounding air. It could be something to do with a deep ocean current that’s channelled onto the continental shelf, close by the glacier’s mouth. As there’s not much sea ice to protect it from the warm water, it could be undercutting the ice and lubricating its flow. But there’s also evidence of a 2,000-year-old volcano that erupted through the ice. It’s possible that the whole region could be volcanically active, releasing geothermal heat which is melting the base of the ice and helping its slide towards the sea. David Vaughan believes the risk of a major collapse of this section of the West Antarctic ice sheet should be taken seriously.
Julian Scott hopes to figure out whether what’s been recorded is an exceptional surge or whether it heralds a major collapse of the ice, and he’s left some GPS measuring instruments behind on the glacier. The BAS researchers say that if the glacier continues to race along, discharging most of its ice into the sea, the PIG alone could raise global sea levels by 25cm (9.8 inches). That might take quite a while — perhaps decades, or even a century, they suggest — but neighbouring glaciers are accelerating too. If the entire region lost its ice, global sea levels would rise by 1.5 metres (59 inches).
This is definitely one PIG that needs to be kept under close surveillance.
Read my Climate Change posts in chronological order by using the Climate Change Log.
If Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are to be believed, the debate about whether or not global warming is caused by human activity (what’s now called Anthropogenic Global Warming, or AGW) is all-but solved. We are the culprits — at least to a 
However, Christopher Booker, 
My reading of the situation is that the scientists quoted in the article to which I referred fully expect the sea ice to return each winter. They also said that what will help determine the extent of the summer melt in 2008 and in future years will be, amongst other things, the thickness (or perhaps I should say thinness) of that returning winter sea ice and how it’s affected by the warm water 
But then, I would feel like that. I’m not a “warmist”, but I have no doubt something very bad is going on with the climate, so I’m dismayed when I read articles that seek to undermine that position. My main concern is not about whether it’s anthropogenically induced or a natural phenomenon. Whatever’s causing it, I think we should be preparing for a sudden, nasty shock when we reach a “tipping point” and things change very quickly indeed.
Notwithstanding their date error, the general thrust of the Unknown Country piece elaborates on solar activity’s effect on our climate, and it makes sobering reading. Normally, it says, the appearance of such a sunspot signals the beginning of a period of higher solar activity, and NASA scientists had predicted in 2005 that the 2008-2011 solar max would be one of the most intense on record. The lack of activity since December (or, more accurately, January) has the Unknown Country team worried that the sun may really be entering a quieter, longer-term cycle. (Image shows the sun on 19th February 2008 — devoid of any sunspots.)
The last time the sun went into “hibernation” began in approximately 1250, and lasted, with cyclic changes, into the mid 18th century — a period we now call “The Little Ice Age”.
Contrasting Unknown Country’s concerns about a quiet Solar Cycle, SpaceWeather.com 
It was 656 feet (200 metres) thick, had an area of 1,255 square miles (3,250 sq. km) and weighed around 500 billion tonnes. In March 2002, the Larsen B ice shelf broke apart. This was not an entirely unexpected event — in 1998, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey had predicted that several ice shelves around the western peninsula were doomed because of rising temperatures in the region, but they were shocked at the speed with which Larsen B collapsed. At the time the reason seemed to be Antarctic summer heatwaves linked to global warming, pure and simple. But now Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University in Wales and Ted Scambos of the USA’s Colorado University have claimed, in a new study, that it had been teetering on the brink of collapse for decades, and that glaciological and atmospheric factors were also invoved.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, a huge fracture in the Beaufort sea ice pack is causing concern amongst scientists. Discovered this winter, the fracture could be a sign of things to come as climate change continues to warm the Arctic, says David Barber, a climate scientist with the University of Manitoba. First discovered in December, the fracture occurred in the Beaufort ice pack off the west coast of Banks Island in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
“It’s the first time we’ve seen it happening so dramatically like this because we lost so much ice last summer,” Barber told