Ice Conditions Key To Antarctic Ice Breakup

We recently read in the news that the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March was strong enough to send waves that snapped a Manhattan-sized chunk of ice off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf some 8,100 miles away.

That’s true, but as pointed out at the end of this piece, there’s more to this story than just the strength of the earthquake. Though it’s not making it into the headlines, the condition of the ice in the region was also key. Specifically, the lack of nearby sea ice, coastal ice (also called fast or landfast ice) and pack ice made the portion of the Sulzberger Ice Shelf that broke off particularly susceptible to the incoming waves from the tsunami.

“The recent calving from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf suggests that, while the rifts provide the ice-shelf front with a zone that is weakened with respect to stress, and while tsunamis arrive episodically to cause vibrational disturbances to these rifts, some additional enabling condition must be satisfied before a given tsunami can lead to the detachment of an iceberg.

The timing of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan coincided with the typical summer sea-ice minimum . As observed in the MODIS imagery and confirmed in the ASAR imagery, the region north of the Sulzberger Ice Shelf was devoid of either fast or pack ice at the time of predicted arrival of the tsunami. Fast ice is an important factor in ice shelf stability . Additionally, the absence of sea ice meant that the energy associated with the tsunami incident on the ice-shelf front was not damped by sea-ice flexure.

With a distant tsunami source, over an irregular ocean bathymetry, and taking into account the dispersion of high-frequency components of the tsunami outside the shallow-water approximation, a complex pattern of dispersed waves is predicted in the wake of the leading front of the tsunami , As these waves interacted with the ice shelf over a period of hours to days, flexural modes may have been resonantly excited, each with the potential to trigger iceberg calving , in a pattern reminiscent of the delayed response of harbors documented in the far field during the 2004 Sumatra tsunami

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How will the Earth system change in the future?

As the world consumes ever more fossil fuel energy, greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise and Earth's average temperature will rise with them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) estimates that Earth's average surface temperature could rise between 2°C and 6°C by the end of the 21st century. 

For most places, global warming will result in more hot days and fewer cool days, with the greatest warming happening over land. Longer, more intense heat waves will happen more often. High latitudes and generally wet places will tend to receive more rainfall, while tropical regions and generally dry places will probably receive less rain. Increases in rainfall will come in the form of bigger, wetter storms, rather than in the form of more rainy days. In between those larger storms will be longer periods of light or no rain, so the frequency and severity of drought will increase. Hurricanes will likely increase in intensity due to warmer ocean surface temperatures. So one of the most obvious impacts of global warming will be changes in both average and extreme temperature and precipitation events. 

Scientists are also monitoring the great ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica, both of which are experiencing increasing melting trends as surface temperatures are rising faster in those parts of the world than anywhere else. Each of those ice sheets contains enough water to raise sea level by 5 meters and if our world continues to warm at the rate it is today then it is a question of when, not if, those ice sheets will collapse. Some scientists warn we could lose either, or both, of them as soon as the year 2100. 

Ecosystems will shift as those plants and animals that adapt the quickest will move into new areas to compete with the currently established species. Those species that cannot adapt quickly enough will face extinction. Scientists note with increasing concern the 21st century could see one of the greatest periods of mass extinction of species in Earth's entire history. Ultimately, global warming will impact life on Earth in many ways. But the extent of the change is up to us.

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Role of Melt in Loss of Old Arctic Sea Ice

Since the start of the satellite record in 1979, scientists have observed the continued disappearance of older "multiyear" sea ice that survives more than one summer melt season. Some scientists suspected that this loss was due entirely to wind pushing the ice out of the Arctic Basin -- a process that scientists refer to as "export." In this study, Ron Kwok and Glenn Cunningham at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., used a suite of satellite data to clarify the relative role of export versus melt within the Arctic Ocean.

Kwok and Cunningham show that between 1993 and 2009, a significant amount of multiyear ice -- 1,400 cubic kilometers (336 cubic miles -- was lost due to melt, not export.

"The paper shows that there is indeed melt of old ice within the Arctic basin and the melt area has been increasing over the past several years," Kwok said. "The story is always more complicated -- there is melt as well as export -- but this is a another step in calculating the mass and area balance of the Arctic ice cover."

The results have implications for understanding how Arctic sea ice gets redistributed, where melt occurs in the Arctic Ocean and how the ocean, ice and atmosphere interact as a system to affect Earth's climate. The study was published October 2010 in Geophysical Research Letters.

Scientists track the annual cycle of Arctic sea ice coverage as it melts through the summer to reach a minimum extent each September, before refreezing through fall and winter. Much of that ice is seasonal, meaning that it forms and melts within the year.

But multiyear ice that survives more than one season has also been declining, as noted in previous work by Joey Comiso of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who shows a loss of about 10 percent per decade since the beginning of the satellite record in 1979. Scientists want to know where this loss is occurring.

"The decline of the multiyear ice cover of the last several decades has not been quantitatively explained," Kwok said.

To investigate the loss of multiyear ice, Kwok and Cunningham looked at a 17-year span of data from 1993 to 2009 from a range of polar-observing satellites and instruments including NASA's Quick Scatterometer (QuikScat); the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat); the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR); and the European Space Agency's ERS-1 and ERS-2. Some instruments track ice coverage, while others track motion and concentration.

The team collected satellite images and tracked pixels of multiyear ice from April 1, prior to the onset of seasonal melt, and into the summer. Pixels that deviate away from images of the ice edge were considered lost to melt.

The team compared summertime melt of multiyear ice in the Beaufort Sea with estimates of ice lost from the Arctic basin through Fram Strait -- a major passage through which ice can exit the Arctic Ocean. The comparison revealed how much multiyear ice was lost to export and how much was lost to melt.

They found that over the 17-year period, an area of 947,000 square kilometers (365,639 square miles), or about 32 percent of the decline in multiyear sea ice area, was lost in the Beaufort Sea due to melt.

A similar calculation using thickness estimates from NASA's ICESat from 2004 to 2009 show a volume loss of 1,400 cubic kilometers (336 cubic miles), or about 20 percent of the total loss by volume.

How and where multiyear ice is lost has impacts on the Arctic system. For example, more loss by melt means more freshwater remains in local Arctic waters rather than being transported southward.

"These results also show that thick multiyear sea ice is not immune to melt in the Pacific sector of the Arctic Ocean in today’s climate," Kwok said.

The additional freshwater from melt in the Pacific sector, which encompasses the area of study, could contribute to the freshening of the Beaufort Gyre and potentially influence circulation, but the degree of that influence remains uncertain.

Not all of the multiyear ice loss is accounted for, however. Ice loss through Fram Strait and from melt from 2005 to 2008 accounts for just 52 percent of total ice loss. The team suggests that melt in other Arctic regions and outflow through other passages besides Fram Strait could account for the difference.

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Hurricane

In 2010, there were 14 named storms, of which 7 were hurricanes and 5 were major hurricanes (that is, category-3, 4 and 5 ones). Hurricane activity this year was about 1.5 times the median hurricane activity level.A hurricane is an intense tropical storm. Tropical storms form over warm tropical oceans when local sea surface temperatures are above 26.5°C (80°F) through a depth of at least 50 meters (160 ft). Under these conditions, evaporation from the ocean surface creates very high humidity in the atmosphere, which in turn generates thunderstorms.

A surefire way to kill a hurricane? Add something called “vertical wind shear” — essentially a change in wind speed and direction with height. It stops the storm from forming in its tracks by ripping it apart.  Another way to kill a hurricane? Whip up a wind across the deserts of northern Africa. Dust gets swept up into the air and helps damp down developing storms. (In fact, it’s the effect of the dust combined with vertical wind shear and super-dry air that’s the killer.)

There’s a school of thought that says that climate change should fuel more hurricanes and more intense ones, because as the planet warms, ocean waters warm and sea surface temperature rises.

In a paper published earlier this year in Science, Thomas R. Knutson, of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and co-authors suggest that we should expect an increase in the frequency of the strongest hurricanes in the Atlantic, roughly by a factor of two by the end of the century, despite a decrease in the overall number of hurricanes. “But we should not expect this trend to be clearly detectable until we near the end of the century, given a scenario in which CO2 [carbon dioxide] doubles by 2100.” The relationship will become more apparent as we improve our understanding and data and as the climate continues to warm.

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Study the Sun During Solar Week

Want to build a pinhole camera to look at an eclipse? Or learn more about how gigantic telescopes examine the sun? The place to go on the Web is solarweek.org from October 18-22. Twice a year, Solar Week provides a weeklong series of web-based educational activities for classrooms about our magnetic variable star, the sun, and its interactions with Earth and the solar system.

Each day of Solar Week offers a different set of lessons and games for students ranging from the upper elementary to high school level. The site covers everything from solar radiation to pursuing careers in science. For example, on Monday, after learning details about how the sun is a star just like the other ones in the sky, students can play a game to determine just where the sun lies in the Milky Way. Or on Thursday, they measure how fast a coronal mass ejection races from the sun.

Helping to answer the students’ questions on an online bulletin board will be three scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. who have been involved almost since the project began in 2000. Throughout the week, Heliophysics researchers Terry Kucera, Dawn Myers, and Holly Gilbert will be among some twenty scientists who will share their excitement about the dynamic star at the center of our solar system. “I think it’s great that the kids get direct interaction with the scientists,” says solar physicist Kucera, who is involved with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory.

Currently run by UC Berkeley, Solar Week was originated by David Alexander in 2000 in coordination with his public outreach work for the Yohkoh solar observatory. He began Solar Week as a means of reaching out to girls and encouraging them in the sciences – incorporating many female solar scientists as role models. The site incorporates only women scientists, but welcomes students of both sexes. The former Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum at UC Berkeley took over Solar Week in 2003 where it is now managed by Karin Hauck and funded through spring of 2011 by NASA’s Sun-Earth Day. Berkeley has continued the tradition of incorporating student interaction with leading scientists at the forefront of Sun-Earth research. “The part of the website I enjoy most is the interactive message board because it’s dynamic,” says Hauck. “You never know what’s going to pop up. Students can be very creative with their questions, and I always learning something new from the scientists’ answers.”

Since one of the goals of Solar Week is to encourage girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers, the Goddard scientists often have to answer questions about their jobs specifically, such as how often they travel or whether their jobs are impacted by the current economy –- and, of course, hobbies like Gilbert’s tournament pool-playing and Myers’s work as a dance teacher come up as well.

“I’m always so grateful,” says Hauck, “that these incredibly busy scientists are willing, year after year, to take time out of their very busy schedules to answer the students’ questions.”

Solar Week is ideal for students studying the solar system, the stars, or astronomy in general. It's also for kids wondering what it's like being a scientist, and pondering possible career choices. For those who miss this week, the activities remain online all year around, but the scientists won’t be available again to answer questions online until next March.

Related Links: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/SolarWeek2010.html

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Help for the Environment

Earth

bout a decade ago, scientists discovered something about the "black earth" in the Amazon River Basin of Brazil that surprised them. They knew it was extremely fertile, unlike other soils in the region.
They discovered that this black earth, or "terra preta" in Portugese, gets its richness from charred wood called biochar that was added by indigenous people to their farmlands over 700 years ago.

The discovery sparked interest in biochar as both a medium for enriching soil and as a way to fight global warming by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"We've been taking carbon stored underground for billions of years and putting it into the atmosphere," says Doris Hamill, a business development manager in the Strategic Relationships Office at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Making biochar is "basically the reverse of what we've been doing."

Plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and change it into plant matter. But when the plant dies, it is eventually broken back down to carbon dioxide. If that plant matter is converted into biochar, the carbon in it doesn't break down any further. Biochar's big benefit is its longevity -- it can last for thousands of years, said Hamill, who is working with local municipal officials to encourage use of the material in Virginia's Hampton Roads region.

"The best thing to do with biochar is put it into the soil, and it's very happy to be there. And when it's in the soil, it does a lot of good things," said Hamill. "It stays there for a long time, and provides a home for soil bacteria and other microbes that improve soil. Even small amounts of biochar are very, very good for the soil."


Make Your Own

Biochar can be created by anyone with a couple of steel barrels, some wood and a match. A biochar "pyrolyzer" built by Langley's fabrication shop consists of a large barrel with a smaller barrel upside-down inside. Biomass to be converted to biochar is placed in the smaller barrel. Wood and other organic fuel goes around it inside the larger barrel to supply the heat for charring.

Fire it up, close it up, hang out for a while, and you have biochar.

While you're waiting, you can ponder the pyrolysis process, in which water and other chemicals are driven out of the wood in an oxygen-free environment that lets the material char but not go up in flames. This same basic process was used to make charcoal three thousand years ago and is used today to make advanced composite materials for NASA missions.

"It's a very simple product," Hamill said. "There's no trick, there's no magic, there's no technology involved."

The biochar can then be augmented with fertilizer or other materials that enrich soil. Mixing biochar with the kind of fertilizer you can buy in a lawn and garden store reduces the amount you need to use by more than half, said Hamill, because it holds the fertilizer instead of letting it wash away. It also helps hold water in the soil.

For a variety of reasons, large-scale biochar production doesn't make sense economically yet, she said. That's why Hamill is out in the community encouraging people to make their own.


Appearing At EarthFest

She's worked with the city of Hampton for about a year on a community biochar project. Master gardeners are testing different materials and mix ratios to enrich the biochar.

"We've come up with an initial small-scale method which involves a blender and some tablespoons and other kitchen things to produce something you could easily hand somebody to use," said master gardener Carol King.

For the many homeowners plagued by pine cones and gum balls, zapping them into useful biochar is the perfect solution, King said. "So this could be wildly popular!"

Hamill and her collaborators also are working on a "starter kit" that includes an instructional video, plans for making and using a pyrolyzer, safety tips and a global-warming primer.

A next step is involving 4-H students in a biochar project at Bluebird Gap Farm in Hampton. The students will gather wood, make biochar, mix it with nutrients, and add it to plots of vegetation. They will see how plants enriched with biochar grow compared to those that do not.

Another Langley employee, engineer Gregory Hajos, plans to crew a biochar exhibit at EarthFest, a NASA public event Oct. 23 at Sandy Bottom Nature Park in Hampton.

Hamill undertook the biochar project "on the side" as a way of using NASA resources to benefit the community, while fulfilling a personal goal -- "a desire," she said, "to help save the world from global warming."

http://www.nasa.gov/

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About Earth

Earth (or the Earth) is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets. It is sometimes referred to as the World, the Blue Planet, or by its Latin name, Terra.

Home to millions of species including humans, Earth is currently the only place where life is known to exist. The planet formed 4.54 billion years ago, and life appeared on its surface within a billion years. Earth's biosphere has significantly altered the atmosphere and other abiotic conditions on the planet, enabling the proliferation of aerobic organisms as well as the formation of the ozone layer which, together with Earth's magnetic field, blocks harmful solar radiation, permitting life on land.The physical properties of the Earth, as well as its geological history and orbit, have allowed life to persist during this period. The planet is expected to continue supporting life for at least another 500 million years.

  
Earth is the third planet from the Sun

The Earth's average distance from the Sun is 149,597,890 km (92,955,820 miles) or one astronomical unit (AU). Located between Venus and Mars, some people have called it the "third rock from the sun."  Our planet's rapid spin and molten nickel-iron core give rise to a magnetic field, which the solar wind distorts into a teardrop shape. The magnetic field does not fade off into space, but has definite boundaries. Just like the field around a magnet, ours is also polarized. When charged particles from the solar wind become trapped in Earth's magnetic field, they collide with air molecules above our planet's magnetic poles. These air molecules then begin to glow and are known as the aurorae, or the Northern and Southern Lights. 

earth's atmosphere is 77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with traces of argon, carbon dioxide and water. This atmosphere affects Earth's long-term climate and short-term local weather; shields us from nearly all harmful radiation coming from the Sun; and protects us from meteors as well - most of which burn up before they can strike the surface. All of the things we need to survive are provided under a thin layer of atmosphere that separates us from the uninhabitable void of space. Earth is made up of complex, interactive systems that are often unpredictable. Air, water, land, and life - including humans - combine forces to create a constantly changing world that we are striving to understand.

Our close proximity prevents us from seeing Earth in its entirety To completely view our own planet, we must leave its surface and journey into space. From the vantage point of space we are able to observe our planet globally, as we do other planets, using similar sensitive instruments to understand the delicate balance among its oceans, air, land, and life. Viewing Earth from the unique perspective of space provides the opportunity to see Earth as a whole. Scientists around the world have discovered many things about our planet by working together and sharing their findings.

Earth interacts with other objects in space, especially the Sun and the Moon. At present, Earth orbits the Sun once for every roughly 366.26 times it rotates about its axis, which is equal to 365.26 solar days, or one sidereal year.The Earth's axis of rotation is tilted 23.4° away from the perpendicular to its orbital plane, producing seasonal variations on the planet's surface with a period of one tropical year (365.24 solar days). Earth's only known natural satellite, the Moon, which began orbiting it about 4.53 billion years ago, provides ocean tides, stabilizes the axial tilt and gradually slows the planet's rotation. Between approximately 3.8 billion and 4.1 billion years ago, numerous asteroid impacts during the Late Heavy Bombardment caused significant changes to the greater surface environment.

EarthFacts.net holds a collection of facts about the planet Earth and some of the lifeforms living on it, as well as some creatures that no longer exist on Earth. We know more today than ever before about our planet Earth and what’s going on around us. Science is always continuing to connect the dots through Earth research, study, and experimentation. As technology advances, we continue to learn and find more out about our planet Earth.

Earth, our home planet, is a beautiful blue and white ball when seen from space. The third planet from the Sun, it is the largest of the inner planets. Earth is the only planet known to support life and to have liquid water at the surface. Earth has a substantial atmosphere and magnetic field, both of which are critical for sustaining life on Earth. Earth is the innermost planet in the solar system with a natural satellite – our Moon

 

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2012 Ice Age 2012 Ice age...?

http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080220052758AAmtL7X

http://www.climatepatrol.com/forum/20/1319/pg1/index.php#pid25338

 http://www.polereversal.com/

http://www.2012online.org/2012research/iceage/

http://2012wiki.com/index.php?title=Ice_Age

http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Fourth-Ice-Age-Movie-Coming-In-2012-18458.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

http://www.2012-doomsday-predictions.com/14156/2012-survival-solar-storms-ice-age-flood-earth-quakes-and-volcanoes/

http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20060105/20060105_18.html

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread442460/pg1

http://haecceities.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/2012-the-maya-calendar-explains-ice-age-fashion/

http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/5thsun.htm

http://www.iceagenow.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

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