How fast are the ice caps melting?
42 times faster than the average over the past few thousand years: New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears – Spiegel Online http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk… New research confirms that ice sheets in West Antarctica are thinning at a far faster rate than in past millennia. Johnson and her colleagues analyzed minerals from the Smith, Pope and Pine Island glaciers in four locations. In a paper in the March edition of the prestigious journal Geology, the researchers write that the data, for the first time, places the current massive loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet in the context of past millennia. And they confirm what scientists have long feared: The glaciers are losing their mass at an “unusually rapid” rate. The paper also states that the thickness of the Pine Island Glacier has shrunk by an average of 3.8 centimeters annually over the past 4,700 years. But the Smith and Pope glaciers hav
The Arctic ice cap September lows (that’s when the maximum melt has occurred each year) have declined approximately 28,000 sq. miles per year from 1979 to 2007. You can read about it at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaicem… Here’s a plot that shows the decline (notice that the Y-axis is in million sq. km): http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaicem… The ice caps around Antarctica haven’t changed significantly as Antarctica is like a huge refrigerator that requires a lot more energy to heat up than the Arctic (north) region which is only water and sea ice (no massive mountains of glaciers there).
The Arctic Sea Ice is melting – but what you don’t hear is the Antarctic sea ice is gaining. Also sea ice melt will NOT increase ocean levels. This .edu web page shows the decreases and increases. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ This chart on the above web page shows no basic change Globally – Global Sea Ice Area – 1979 to present http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/… Also a good read about: Misleading Reports About Antarctic Melting http://www.iceagenow.com/Misleading_Repo… Don’t be duped by Alarmists media propaganda.
They have melted a lot since the last ice age. Don’t buy into poor polar bear scare. Animal population runs in cycles. The best example is rabbits and predators. When the rabbit population grows the predators have larger litters, when they shrink, smaller litters. By protecting the polar bear we will actually be responsible for the ones that die a long painful death by starvation. A better question is why does mankind think they are so important that they can actually chance nature.
