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Antarctic Water Movement
Scientists are discovering our waters are dramatically changing form.
Why would a planet do such a thing? We may not realize that rising sea
levels may only be a short precursor to lower sea levels as the earth
freezes like a rock. There are many factors to thwart global melting, as
asteroids, and comets, along with earthquakes and volcanoes could easily
alter that course. There is also the hypothesis of roaming planets, as
in a second sun that doesn't burn, which is on its way back closer to
earth on its elliptical journey through space. Large NEO's [near earth
objects] alter the planet easily, like sucking the atmosphere out into
space temporarily, and then thrusting it back down at 300 degrees below
zero. A little more water on the planet might just be to cool it down so
it doesn't explode.
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Antarctic Water Movement Forces a Rethink
19 February 2007 - London - Alok Jha
SCIENTISTS have detected a network of lakes and rivers
of rapidly moving water under the thick ice sheet of West
Antarctica, a discovery that will force a revision of predictions of
global sea levels as the sheet melts due to climate change.
"What we're seeing here is a lot more movement of stuff underneath
the Antarctic ice sheet than we ever dreamt possible. This has been
going on for a long time," says David Vaughan of the British
Antarctic Survey.
The faster the water moves in the sub-glacial lakes, the more
quickly any melting ice from the heart of the continent will get
into the open sea, causing water levels to rise.
"The way we model the ice sheets to predict how they will behave in
the future, how they will contribute to sea level rise in the
future, doesn't take into account all of this [new work]," says Prof
Vaughan.
The latest scientific report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change says an uncertainty about how ice sheets respond to
climate change is the biggest unknown in predicting sea levels
around the world.
"We can't make faithful predictions of what's going to happen to
Antarctica unless we get this process understood," says Dr Helen
Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University
of California, San Diego.
Dr Fricker used satellite data to map the rise and fall of the
overlying ice which is up to 3km thick as the lakes emptied and
filled with water. "Over a period of three years from 2003 to 2006
we found regions where the elevation had changed dramatically the
first lake we found had deflated by nine metres, which we were just
amazed to see," Dr Fricker says of the results which are published
today in Science.
More than 145 isolated lakes have been previously reported to exist
under the ice sheet. But new bodies of water have been discovered,
ranging in size from 120 to 500 sq km in 14 places around Antarctica
and many are connected by rapidly moving water channels.
"The old paradigm was that most of the Antarctic was frozen to its
bed. In a few places there was free water at the bottom and that was
lubricating fast ice flow and that was all very steady, nothing
changed very much," Prof Vaughan says. But this view had become out
of date.
"Water is not moving around in a steady trickle but filling up in
one place and bursting through to another and this process is more
widespread than we thought," he says. Observer |
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The
The
Labors in the Spirits of
Science
Living on the Lost Planet 
