So I’m reading this article today on the Washington Post’s site titled “Scientists finally have an explanation for why huge lakes atop Greenland are vanishing.” I just assumed the explanation would be that it’s my fault for existing.
You see, there are these large pools of water called “supraglacial lakes” that appear on the Greenland ice sheet surface. These lakes are created by seasonal melting, and some of these lakes disappear over the summer. Scientists looked into the reasons why the lakes disappear and where the water goes.
If I understand it right, the researchers say that the reason the lakes disappear is because water that comes from other places beneath the ice sheet lubricates the ice where these lakes are, making the ice stretch, thereby forming large cracks. (I know what you’re thinking–stop that.) The lake water then drains through the cracks (I said stop), and the water adds to the other water (ugh, you’re terrible), much of which eventually makes its way into the ocean (ten-minute time out for you…now). The cracks on the surface freeze up and close over the winter, the supraglacial lakes re-form when it gets warmer, and the cycle continues again the following season. Back in 2006, researchers calculated that water from one of these lakes emptied at a rate faster than the rate of water flowing over Niagara Falls.
But what caught my attention was what the article noted in regard to the amount of water that would raise the level of the seas. Near the beginning of the article, I read this:
There was only one place all that water could have gone – down into the ice sheet, where researchers feared it could lubricate its base and hasten its slide into the ocean. Little understood phenomena like this, they wrote, could add to the dynamism and rapidity with which Greenland – which contains enough ice to raise sea levels 20 feet – responds to global warming by melting and pouring water into the ocean.
Uh oh. Researchers feared. And you can, too! Let the worldwide freak-out/guilt trip continue. I should be nice to the author of the article and add that nowhere in it are we accused of committing mass seppuku by throwing a plastic bottle in the trash or by using a gas-powered mower for the lawn.
Yet in the second-to-last paragraph of the article, past the spiffy NASA animation of Greenland’s different layers of snow and ice, was a detail that seemed sort of relevant to the context of the alarming 20-foot sea level rise mentioned earlier:
A recent study estimated that from 2009 through 2012, the Greenland ice sheet lost 378 gigatons of ice annually (plus or minus 50 gigatons) – where a gigaton is a billion metric tons. Three hundred and sixty gigatons are enough to raise the global sea level by one millimeter. The overall annual sea level rise was recently estimated at 2.6 to 2.9 millimeters, which would make Greenland about a third of the total.
Wow, that’s a lot of lost ice, isn’t it? But if you’re paying attention, kids, that still only brings Greenland’s annual contribution to the rise of the oceans to less than a millimeter. 6,096 millimeters equals 20 feet. You know what that means…
Stock up on the non-perishables. Get your emergency liferafts. Because any. Day. Now.
In today’s other enviro-news you can use:
Via Politico, the EPA tells us that fracking…
(cue the Will Farrell clip again)
…is nowhere as bad to drinking water as some have suspected.
(delete clip)
A long-awaited EPA report released Thursday found no signs of “widespread, systemic” drinking water pollution caused by fracking — a conclusion that offers a victory to the oil and gas industry and a major blow to a wave of grassroots anti-drilling movements sprouting across the country…
“After more than five years and millions of dollars, the evidence gathered by EPA confirms what the agency has already acknowledged and what the oil and gas industry has known,” said Erik Milito, a director at the American Petroleum Institute. “Hydraulic fracturing is being done safely under the strong environmental stewardship of state regulators and industry best practices.”
But some groups just can’t let go of their Debbie Downer dispositions.
The green group Earthworks said it was drawing the opposite conclusion: “Today EPA confirmed what communities living with fracking have known for years, fracking pollutes drinking water,” the group’s policy director, Lauren Pagel, said in a statement. “Now the Obama administration, Congress, and state governments must act on that information to protect our drinking water, and stop perpetuating the oil and gas industry’s myth that fracking is safe.”
Cut them some slack–it’s their job to refute reality. God bless ’em.
Lastly, some denying deniers of changing climates call the NOAA into question over some adjustments it made to its numbers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration managed to eliminate the hiatus of global warming over the last 15 years by making the time before the hiatus cooler, according to the contributors of Watts Up With That, who call the NOAA’s attempt to change the past to its liking “laughable.” More information with sciencey charts and whatnot can be viewed at the link. (Hat tip: the Daily Caller.)
All is well, people. No, really. All is well.
For now…
