LAT: Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip, Sliding Away

Greenland's Ice Sheet Is Slip, Sliding Away
The massive glaciers are deteriorating twice as fast as they were five years ago. If the ice thaws entirely, sea level would rise 21 feet.
By Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer
June 25, 2006


(AP)

....The Greenland ice sheet — two miles thick and broad enough to blanket an area the size of Mexico — shapes the world's weather, matched in influence by only Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere....

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In its heartland, snow that fell a quarter of a million years ago is still preserved. Temperatures dip as low as 86 degrees below zero. Ground winds can top 200 mph. Along the ice edge, meltwater rivers thread into fraying brown ropes of glacial outwash, where migrating herds of caribou and musk ox graze....

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Should all of the ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world's coastal cities, home to a billion people. It would cause higher tides, generate more powerful storm surges and, by altering ocean currents, drastically disrupt the global climate.

Climate experts have started to worry that the ice cap is disappearing in ways that computer models had not predicted.

By all accounts, the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago, even as the ice sheets of Antarctica — the world's largest reservoir of fresh water — also are shrinking, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Kansas reported in February....

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-greenland25jun25,0,1900887,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Because I knew the factors the models did not cover.

Greenland, doncha? Cause it used to be GREEN!'..Really, and he was smart enough to dial a telephone? I guess it is the new fangled 'push buttons'...What an IDIOT, and no one corrected him! Not any Democratic callers, not the host....I was really flaberghasted!

It won't be until ocean levels begin to rise that anyone in the RW government will take notice.

And some of that was thermal expansion.

And keep-up with this very subject weekly. Some are either in denial, can't face it, or don't want to disturb their lobbyist connections and fattening of wallets. Those latter reasons are seriously sad.