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ICE WORLD
Record melt from Greenland icesheet in 2010
by Staff Writers
Paris (AFP) Jan 21, 2011


2010 was coldest year in U.K. since 1986
London (UPI) Jan 21, 2011 - U.K. weather experts say 2010 was the coldest year recorded in Britain since 1986 while the rest of the world had one of the hottest on record. The U.K. Met Office said the mean temperature in 2010 was 46.5 degrees Fahrenheit, the 12th coldest on record, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday. The coldest years in the last 100 years were 1919 and 1963, when mean temperatures plunged to 45.4 degrees F, and the next coldest was 1986 when it was 45.8 degrees F, the Met Office said.

Meanwhile the rest of the world was warmer than ever, 0.9 F hotter than the long-term average of 57.2 F, making 2010 the second hottest on record after 1998. A freezing beginning of 2010 in January and February and then the coldest December ever recorded brought down the temperature in the United Kingdom, Met Office meteorologist Barry Grommett said. Despite the cold year in the United Kingdom, the world is warming, Grommett said. "It is a natural perception to look out window and see snow and think the world cannot be possibly be warming but the United Kingdom is a small dot on the world surface and the important picture is global, and in that 2010 has been a very warm year," he said.

Greenland's icesheet, feared as a major driver of rising sea levels, shed a record amount of melted snow and ice in 2010, scientists reported Friday, a day after the UN said last year was the warmest on record.

The 2010 runoff was more than twice the average annual loss in Greenland over the previous three decades, surpassing a record set in 2007, said the study, published in the US-based journal Environmental Research Letters.

Ice melt has now topped this benchmark every year since 1996, according to the paper, derived from long-term satellite and observational data.

Were it to melt entirely, Greenland's icesheet would drive up ocean levels by some seven metres (23 feet), drowning coastal cities around the world.

No credible projections today include a doomsday scenario for the coming centuries. But recent research, including the new study, suggest that Greenland will contribute more to rising seas than predicted only a few years ago.

Based on computer models, Tedesco estimated that runoff in 2010 was 530 gigatonnes, or billions of tonnes, compared to an average of 274 gigatonnes for the period 1958-2009, and 285 gigatonnes for 1979-2009.

"The process is far from being linear, and it is not possible to simply draw a line" into the future, said lead researcher Marco Tedesco, who heads the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory at the City College of New York.

But over the last 30 years "there has been an increase in runoff," he said in an email exchange.

Researchers have thrown up different figures for how much, and how fast, Greenland is shedding its icy mantle, which is up to three kilometres (1.7 miles) thick in places.

They concur, though, that climate change is largely to blame: temperatures in the Arctic region have risen at two to three times the global average over the last 40 years.

In Greenland, summer temperatures in 2010 were 3.0 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

"The capital, Nuuk, had the warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873," Tedesco noted.

Globally, the year was also the warmest ever recorded, as was the decade it brought to a close, the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Thursday.

The new study focused on surface melt, runoff and the number of days when bare ice, free of snow, is exposed to the Sun's radiative force.

In 2010, "melting in some areas stretched up to 50 days longer than average," Tedesco said.

The study also showed that land area where melting has been observed has been increasing at a rate of about 17,000 square kilometers (6,500 square miles) per year.

Not only do melting snow and ice flow directly into the sea, they also form torrential under-ice streams that lubricate the passage of glaciers toward the ocean.

In assessing the icesheet's total mass loss, melt is only part of the picture, Tedesco said.

"Our calculations do not account for losses due to calving" -- the splitting of large chunks of glacier ice into the sea -- "and ice dynamics, which are as big if not bigger than those due to surface melting," he said.

Nor did they factor in cyclical contributions to the icesheet from snowfall, he said.

Current estimates of the Greenland icesheets net mass loss vary between 130 and 250 gigatonnes per year.

Antarctica is the world's biggest source of land ice after Greenland, but -- with the exception of West Antarctica -- is considered more resistant to any doomsday collapse.

By century's end, Greenland could contribute as much as 50 centimetres (20 inches) to average worldwide sea levels, many experts agree today.

This would double the predictions for overall sea-level rise in the UN climate panel's landmark 2007 report, which factored in glacial runoff and the thermal expansion of the sea, but not the loss of mass from Greenland.

A one-metre (3.25 feet) increase in the global watermark would devastate many island nations, and wreak havoc in heavily-populated delta regions across the planet.

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Mountain Glacier Melt To Contribute 12 Centimetres To World Sea-Level Increases By 2100
Washington DC (SPX) Jan 17, 2011
Melt off from small mountain glaciers and ice caps will contribute about 12 centimetres to world sea-level increases by 2100, according to UBC research published this week in Nature Geoscience. The largest contributors to projected global sea-level increases are glaciers in Arctic Canada, Alaska and landmass bound glaciers in the Antarctic. Glaciers in the European Alps, New Zealand, the C ... read more


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