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The longest — and probably largest — proof of our current climate catastrophe ever caught on camera.

April 17, 2024

The longest — and probably largest — proof of our current climate catastrophe ever caught on camera.

It was the largest such event ever filmed.

climate change, environment, global emergency, arctic circle

Photographer James Balog and his crew were hanging out near a glacier when their camera captured something extraordinary.

They were in Greenland, gathering footage from the time-lapse they’d positioned all around the Arctic Circle for the last several years.

They were also there to shoot scenes for a documentary. And while they were hoping to capture some cool moments on camera, no one expected a huge chunk of a glacier to snap clean off and slide into the ocean right in front of their eyes.

A glacier falls into the sea.
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Massive swells created by large chunks of glacier falling away.
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It was the largest such event ever filmed.

For nearly an hour and 15 minutes, Balog and his crew stood by and watched as a piece of ice the size of lower Manhattan — but with ice-equivalent buildings that were two to three times taller than that — simply melted away.

A representation demonstrating the massive size of ice that broke off into the sea.
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As far as anyone knows, this was an unprecedented geological catastrophe and they caught the entire thing on tape. It won’t be the last time something like this happens either.

But once upon a time, Balog was openly skeptical about that “global warming” thing.

Balog had a reputation since the early 1980s as a conservationist and environmental photographer. And for nearly 20 years, he’d scoffed at the climate change heralds shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

“I didn’t think that humans were capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of this entire, huge planet. It didn’t seem probable, it didn’t seem possible,” he explained in the 2012 documentary film “Chasing Ice.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change Is Pushing Greenland Over the Edge

January 31, 2022

Detail of the Jakobshavn Glacier also knows as Ilulissat glacier in Greenland

Whether the ice cap in western Greenland grows or shrinks depends on a balance between snow accumulation and melting. In the past, warm periods increased snowfall which caused it to grow. Today, melting is winning. Photo by Ruben Ramos/Alamy Stock Photo

Climate Change Is Pushing Greenland Over the Edge

New data from Greenland shows that modern warming is outpacing even historically warm eras like the Medieval Warm Period.

Matthew Osman stands atop an ice cap in western Greenland looking out over the Nuussuaq Peninsula. In the distance and more than 2,000 meters below, the village of Ilulissat is a tiny speck in the vast expanse of snow and ice. As Osman steps into the snow, he sinks into a crevasse up to his thigh. Carefully easing his way out, he’s reminded of the hazards of working on ice. Like others who have ventured to drill into Greenland’s ice, Osman and his colleagues are braving the dangers to search for clues as to how the climate has changed in the past, and, by extension, how it may change in the future. What they’ve found is an unexpected sign of just how acute ongoing climate change really is.

The research team led by Osman, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona, came to Greenland to extract a 140-meter-long ice core. This core stretches nearly to bedrock and, in the gases and chemicals housed within, holds evidence of climate change over the past 2,000 years. Their analysis of the core shows that in this place during the Medieval Warm Period, a roughly 400-year phase of higher global temperatures around 1,000 years ago, the ice was growing thicker and advancing—the opposite of what it’s doing today.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greenland’s largest glaciers nearing rates of melt expected in ‘worst-case scenario’

November 19, 2020

Greenland’s largest glaciers nearing rates of melt expected in ‘worst-case scenario’

Greenland’s three biggest glaciers added the equivalent of around 8mm to global sea levels from 1880 to 2012, study says

Photo of Jakobshavn Isbræ, one of Greenland’s largest glaciers

(Shfaqat Abbas Khan, DTU Space Denmark)

Greenland’s largest glaciers are currently melting at levels close to what scientists had previously expected under a future “worst-case scenario”, a study has found.

Using a combination of aerial photographs and field data, the study found that current rates of mass loss from Greenland’s three largest glaciers are higher than once thought.

The melting of these three glaciers added the equivalent of around 8mm to global sea levels from 1880 to 2012, according to the research.

Previous had estimated that the same three glaciers would contribute 9-15mm to global sea levels by 2100 under a “worst-case scenario”.

The Greenland ice sheet is a mass of frozen freshwater sitting on the island of Greenland that is around 1.7m square kilometres in size. This is about three times the size of Texas.

As a result of climbing air and ocean temperatures, the ice sheet is losing mass each year. The loss of mass from Greenland’s glaciers is, in turn, causing sea levels to rise.

The research, published in , focuses on the “big three” glaciers in Greenland: Jakobshavn Isbræ, Kangerlussuaq Glacier and Helheim Glacier. These glaciers together hold enough ice to raise sea levels by around 1.3 metres, if they melted completely.

It found that the amount of sea level rise from the melting of these three glaciers is already nearing rates previously expected under a future “worst-case” scenario.

This suggests that, if the world were to see extremely high emissions in the coming decades, ice loss from Greenland’s glaciers would be considerably higher than previously projected, explains study author Prof Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pounding Heat Clobbers Greenland

August 6, 2019

Pounding Heat Clobbers Greenland

Photograph Source: Ralf Roletschek – GFDL 1.2

Greenland is one of the biggest targets for global warming, in part, because it’s so big it’s hard to miss. And sure enough, only recently crazy halting weather with inordinate hot temperature hit Greenland bull’s-eye, dead-on with one helluva meltdown.

That’s bad news for pretty much everybody on the planet.

On the hottest days, the melt-off could fill 3 billion Olympic-sized pools end-to-end, extending from California to Maine, back and forth, 17,000 times. Eureka! That’s only one day. It’s staggering.

What’s going on?

The easy answer: Greenland is melting because global warming is acting up, a lot. But, it’s more complicated. Part of the meltdown includes a 4-mile-wide iceberg that broke off the Helheim Glacier July 11^th. That’s equivalent to a small town floating/melting along the southeastern coastline of Greenland.

In that regard, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists: “Climate Hot Map, Helheim Glacier – The glacier was stable from the 1950s to 2000.” Thereafter, rapidly rising temps jarred it loose from its stable moorings, losing five miles of ice in its first five years of the 21^stcentury. Oops! So much for 50 years of stability.

In point of fact, Greenland’s glaciers, in toto, have doubled their rate of retreat this century, which is more than any historical data. That’s not only ominous, it’s indicative of the enormous power behind anthropogenic turbo-charged climate change. It’s happening fast and faster.

But still, it’s not unusual for parts of Greenland to melt every summer when the planet tilts its northern face towards the sun. Then, year-by-year with regularity about 10% of the ice sheet hits a melting point. However, this year the first big heat wave in June hit 45% of the ice sheet with melting points as air temps hovered 10°C to 15°C above normal, which is beach weather for Greenland.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“Unprecedented” Arctic Wildfires Visible From Space As ‘Global Cooling’ Looms

July 29, 2019

“Unprecedented” Arctic Wildfires Visible From Space As ‘Global Cooling’ Looms

Numerous wildfires have been ravaging the Arctic for weeks following the hottest June ever recorded on Earth. Now, the fires are so huge and intense, the smoke can literally be seen from space.

As RT reports, satellite images show more than 100 long-lived wildfires with huge plumes of swirling black smoke covering most of the Arctic Circle including parts of Russia, Siberia, Greenland and Alaska.

#TheNewNormal?
Smoke vortex caused by the #Siberia #wildfires
A rough order of magnitude estimate puts the smoke-covered area at a mind boggling 2 million (yes million) square kilometres#Sentinel3 acquired today 24 July

The wildfires have now reached “unprecedented levels,”according to Mark Parrington of the EU’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service, who said the smoke vortex is covering a “mind boggling” two million square kilometers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Factcheck: What Greenland ice cores say about past and present climate change

March 7, 2019

Factcheck: What Greenland ice cores say about past and present climate change

A misleading graph purporting to show that past changes in Greenland’s temperatures dwarf modern climate change has been circling the internet since at least 2010.

Based on an early Greenland ice core record produced back in 1997, versions of the graph have, variously, mislabeled the x-axis, excluded the modern observational temperature record and conflated a single location in Greenland with the whole world.

More recently, researchers have drilled numerous additional ice cores throughout Greenland and produced an updated estimate past Greenland temperatures.

This modern temperature reconstruction, combined with observational records over the past century, shows that current temperatures in Greenland are warmer than any period in the past 2,000 years. That said, they are likely still cooler than during the early part of the current geological epoch – the Holocene – which started around 11,000 years ago.

However, warming is expected to continue in the future as human actions continue to emit greenhouse gases, primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels.

Climate models project that if emissions continue, by 2050, Greenland temperatures will exceed anything seen since the last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago.

Ice cores as climate ‘proxies’

Widespread thermometer measurements of temperatures only extend back to the mid-1700s. Scientists investigating how temperatures have changed prior to the invention of thermometers need to rely on a variety of climate “proxies”, which are correlated with temperature and can be used to infer, with some uncertainties, how it has changed in the past.

An ice core from Greenland is prepared for cutting at the National Ice Core Laboratory. Credit: Jim West / Alamy Stock Photo.

Climate proxies can be obtained from sources, such as tree rings, ice cores, fossil pollen, ocean sediments and corals. Ice cores are one of the best available climate proxies, providing a fairly high-resolution estimate of climate changes into the past.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Arctic Heats Up in the Dead of Winter

March 6, 2018

The Arctic Heats Up in the Dead of Winter

Photo by NOAA Photo Library | CC BY 2.0

Every once in a while a climatic event hits that forces people to sit down to catch their breath. Along those lines, abnormal Arctic heat waves in the dead of winter may force scientists to revaluate downwards (or maybe upwards, depending) their most pessimistic of forecasts.

By the end of February 2018, large portions of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland were open blue water, meaning no ice. But, it’s wintertime, no daylight 24/7, yet no ice in areas where it’s usually some meters thick! In a remarkable, mindboggling turn of events, thick ice in early February by month’s end turned into wide open blue water, metaphorically equivalent to an airline passenger at 35,000 feet watching rivets pop off the fuselage.

The sea ice north of Greenland is historically the thickest, most solid ice of the North Pole. But, it’s gone all of a sudden! Egads, what’s happening and is it a danger signal? Answer: Probably, depending upon which scientist is consulted. Assuredly, nobody predicted loss of ice north of Greenland in the midst of winter.

Wide open blue seas in the Arctic expose all of humanity to risks of Runaway Global Warming (“RGW”) as, over time, massive amounts of methane erupts with ancillary sizzling of agricultural crops, and as the Arctic heats up much faster than the rest of the planet, this also throws a curve ball at weather patterns all across the Northern Hemisphere, radical weather patterns ensue, like snow on the French Riviera only recently.

According to Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, February was the warmest (hottest) on record in the Arctic, which includes 10 days of temps above freezing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shock impacts hit Greenland’s ice

May 14, 2016

Shock impacts hit Greenland’s ice

An aerial view of icebergs floating in Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord. Image: Mark Garten/UN Photo

New research indicates that melting of the Northern Hemisphere’s biggest ice sheet is being accelerated by the seismic impact of waves crashing against Greenland’s coastline.

LONDON, 14 May, 2016 – Seismic waves that race through Greenland’s bedrock may help answer questions about the pattern of melting and freezing over the Northern Hemisphere’s biggest single sheet of ice.

Scientists need answers because Greenland remains a puzzle: the glaciers may be accelerating their pace towards the sea − but, despite rising temperatures, the interior is not losing ice, according to a second study.

And a third study presents a new paradox: there may be little ice melt over most of the icecap, but changing climatic conditions suggest that less snow is falling.

There is enough ice packed on Greenland to raise global sea levels by seven metres if it melts. Right now, the flow from the island’s glaciers is probably pushing up sea levels by 0.6mm a year.

Harsh conditions

There is repeatedly confirmed evidence that glaciers are melting at an accelerating rate, and several consequences of global climate changethat suggest that this process should go on accelerating.

But research in Greenland’s harsh conditions is challenging, and year-round continuous observation so far has been almost impossible, even with airpower and satellite studies.

But German Prieto, assistant professor of geophysics in the department of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues report in Science Advances journal that they could exploit the one source of evidence that would never falter.

The waves that crash on the coastline send tiny seismic shudders through the rock, and seismic wave velocity changes with rock density. So the reasoning is that changes in the mass of ice pressing down on the rocks could be revealed by changes in the speed of the waves through the rock.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat

May 7, 2016

Abrupt Sea Level Rise Looms As Increasingly Realistic Threat

Ninety-nine percent of the planet’s freshwater ice is locked up in the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps. Now, a growing number of studies are raising the possibility that as those ice sheets melt, sea levels could rise by six feet this century, and far higher in the next, flooding many of the world’s populated coastal areas.

Christopher Michel/Flickr

West Antarctica’s glaciers and floating ice shelves are becoming increasingly unstable.

Last month in Greenland, more than a tenth of the ice sheet’s surface was melting in the unseasonably warm spring sun, smashing 2010’s record for a thaw so early in the year. In the Antarctic, warm water licking at the base of the continent’s western ice sheet is, in effect, dissolving the cork that holds back the flow of glaciers into the sea; ice is now seeping like wine from a toppled bottle.

The planet’s polar ice is melting fast, and recent satellite data, models, and fieldwork have left scientists sobered by the speed of the sea level rise we should expect over the coming decades. Although researchers have long projected that the planet’s biggest ice sheets and glaciers will wilt in the face of rising temperatures, estimates of the rate of that change keep going up. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out its last report in 2013, the consensus was for under a meter (3.3 feet) of sea level rise by 2100. In just the last few years, at least one modeling study suggests we might need to double that.

Eric Rignot at the University of California, Irvine says that study underscores the possible speed of ice sheet melt and collapse. “Once these processes start to kick in,” he says, “they’re very fast.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cloud blanket warms up melting icecap

January 31, 2016

Cloud blanket warms up melting icecap

Ominous clouds over the icecap near Kangerlussuaq in Western Greenland.
Image: Nikolaj F. Rasmussen via Flickr

New study shows that up to 30% of the Greenland icecap melting is due to cloud cover that is helping to raise temperatures − and accelerate sea level rise.

LONDON, 30 January, 2016 – Researchers have identified another piece in the climate machinery that is accelerating the melting of the Greenland ice cap. The icy hills are responding to the influence of a higher command system: the clouds.

An international research team led by scientists from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium report in Nature Communications journal that cloud cover above the northern hemisphere’s largest single volume of permanent ice is raising temperatures by between 2° and 3°C and accounting for 20-30% of the melting.

The conclusion, based on imaging from satellites and on computer simulations, is one more part of the global examination of the intricate climate systems on which human harvests, health and happiness ultimately depend.

Disastrous consequences

“With climate change at the back of our minds, and the disastrous consequences of global sea level rise, we need to understand these processes to make more reliable projections for the future,” says the study leader, Kristof Van Tricht, a Ph.D research fellow in Leuven’s Division of Geography and Tourism. “Clouds are more important for that purpose than we used to think.

“Clouds always have several effects. On the one hand, they help add mass to the ice sheet when it snows. On the other, they have an indirect effect on the ice sheet as well.

“They have an impact on the temperature, and snow and ice react to these changes by melting and refreezing. That works both ways. Clouds block the sunlight, which lowers the temperature. At the same time, they form a blanket that keeps the surface warm, especially at night.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deep concerns as climate impacts on Gulf Stream flow

March 27, 2015

Deep concerns as climate impacts on Gulf Stream flow

Ocean scientists find evidence of an increasing slowdown in the Atlantic’s “invisible river” that could seriously affect weather and sea levels in the US and Europe.

LONDON, 25 March, 2015 − Climate scientists have once again confirmed an alarmingslowdown in the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean − the process that drives the current that warms Europe, and powers the planetary climate.

And this time, they are prepared to say that the changes are recent − and may be linked to global warming.

The Atlantic Conveyor is a great invisible river that flows in two directions at the same time. The equatorial surface waters − warm, and therefore less dense − flow towards the north in the form of the Gulf Stream. Around Greenland, the denser and colder Arctic waters sink to the ocean bottom and begin their progress towards the south.

It is the difference in temperatures that maintains the turnover and keeps the climate engine going.

As a consequence, the two-way traffic of warm and cold water redistributes heat around the planet and keeps Britain and maritime Europe in relatively mild conditions.

But as global average temperatures rise, and the Greenland ice sheet melts, ocean scientists have warned that the speed of the ocean turnover could be put at risk.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oil Industry Withdraws From High Cost Areas

January 19, 2015

Oil Industry Withdraws From High Cost Areas

The oil industry is pulling back from some marginal areas of operation, slashing jobs and spending, and retrenching in the face of the ongoing slump in oil markets.

Signs of a shrinking footprint are beginning to pop up across the globe. Norway’s Statoil has let three of its exploration licenses expire in Greenland, an acknowledgement that exploring in frontier lands no longer makes sense with oil at $50 per barrel. Not too long ago, Greenland was hyped as an unexplored and pristine new oil region. The excitement was enough to fuel a bit of an independence movement within Greenland to pull away from Denmark.

Statoil also put an end to negotiations with Lundin Petroleum over building an oil terminal in Norway’s far north. Building an Arctic terminal would aid the development of several offshore oil and gas fields in the Barents Sea, where the companies each have made several discoveries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Arctic Explorers Retreat From Hostile Waters With Oil Prices Low

January 14, 2015

Arctic Explorers Retreat From Hostile Waters With Oil Prices Low

When Statoil ASA (STL) acquired the last of three licenses off Greenland’s west coast in January 2012, oil at more than $110 a barrel made exploring the iceberg-ridden waters an attractive proposition.

Less than two years later, the price of oil had been cut by almost half and Norway’s Statoil, the world’s most active offshore Arctic explorer in 2014, relinquished its interest in all three licenses in December without drilling a single well, Knut Rostad, a spokesman for the state-controlled company, said by e-mail.

Statoil’s decision shows how the plunge in oil, with Brent crude trading at about $45 a barrel, has dealt another blow to companies and governments hoping to tap the largely unexplored Arctic. That threatens to demote the importance of a region already challenged by high costs, environmental concerns, technological obstacles and, in the case of Russia, international sanctions.

“At $50, it just doesn’t make sense,” James Henderson, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said in a Jan. 12 phone interview. “Arctic exploration has almost certainly been significantly undermined for the rest of this decade.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Satellite Provides Sharper Picture of Shrinking Ice Sheet – Truthdig

December 28, 2014

Satellite Provides Sharper Picture of Shrinking Ice Sheet – Truthdig.

LONDON—Greenland’s ice sheet shrank by an average of 243 billion tonnes a year between 2003 and 2009—a rate of melting that is enough to raise the world’s sea levels by 0.68 mm per year.

In what is claimed as the first detailed study, geologist Beata Csatho, of the University of Buffalo in the US, and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they used satellite and aerial data to reconstruct changes in the ice sheet at 100,000 places, and to confirm that the process of losing 277 cubic kilometres of ice a year is more complex than anyone had predicted.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second biggest body of ice on Earth—second only to Antarctica—and its role in the machinery of the northern hemisphere climate is profound.

Careful measurements

It has been closely studied for decades, but such are the conditions in the high Arctic that researchers have tended to make careful measurements of ice melt and glacier calving in fixed locations—in particular, at four glaciers—and then try to estimate what that might mean for the island as a whole.

“The great importance of our data is that, for the first time, we have acomprehensive picture of how all of Greenland’s glaciers have changed over the past decade,” Dr Csatho said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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It was the largest such event ever filmed.

Ice cores as climate ‘proxies’

Careful measurements

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