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Arctic thaw significantly worsens global warming risk
Posted by New Scientist: Jeff Hecht on February 18th, 2014
New Scientist: Melting ice is cooking the planet. Shrinking Arctic sea ice means the ocean is absorbing more energy from the sun, and it's now clear the effect is twice as big as thought - adding significantly to heating from greenhouse gases.
Arctic temperatures have risen 2 °C since the 1970s, leading to a 40 per cent dip in the minimum summer ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean. Open water soaks up more sunlight than ice, so as the ice retreats the ocean absorbs more energy, warming it and causing even more...
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Antarctic ice may be more stable than we thought
Posted by New Scientist: Jeff Hecht on March 5th, 2011
New Scientist: WHETHER Antarctica's ice will survive a warmer world is one of the great puzzles of climate science. Now it seems vast expanses of ice may have hung on for the past 200,000 years, surviving the last interglacial.
The west Antarctic ice sheet's base is below sea level, which should make it unstable. If it were to collapse the torrent of fresh water could raise global sea level by 5 metres. Whether or not this will happen as temperatures climb is a hotly debated topic.
A new study by David Sugden...
Deep ice growth on Antarctica’s ghost mountains
Posted by New Scientist: Jeff Hecht on March 3rd, 2011
New Scientist: Anyone who lives in areas where snow accumulates over the winter learns that new snow builds on top of old mounds. So it's only natural to assume the same process created the great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
Not so, say Robin Bell of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, and her colleagues. Their radar observations show that the East Antarctic ice sheet is also growing from the bottom up. "We usually think of ice sheets like cakes - one layer at a time, added...