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A gigantic cavity — two-thirds the area of Manhattan and almost 1,000 feet (300 meters) tall — growing at the bottom of Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is one of several disturbing discoveries reported in a new NASA-led study of the disintegrating glacier. The findings highlight the need for detailed observations of Antarctic glaciers' undersides in calculating how fast global sea levels will rise in response to climate change.
Researchers expected to find some gaps between ice and bedrock at Thwaites' bottom where ocean water could flow in and melt the glacier from below. The size and explosive growth rate of the newfound hole, however, surprised them. It's big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice, and most of that ice melted over the last three years.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/huge-cavity-in-antarctic-glacier-signals-rapid-decay
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Friday February 01 2019, @11:46PM (9 children)
How do I convert 1 Manhattan, which I have no clue as to it's size, to 1 Rhode Island, which again I have no clue as to it's size?
Maybe convert it to football fields or, I dunno, just tossing this out, acres or, I'm old and don't keep up with these things, maybe square miles.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:01AM (4 children)
One manhattan - 59.1 km²
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:12AM (2 children)
Unit error !
Please properly convert all liquid volumes to Olympic Swimming Pools.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 02 2019, @02:59AM (1 child)
Hold on, hold on... first I need to convert this to something more standard: 59.1 km^2 is about 49.9 gigahogsheads per furlong. You should be able to sort it out from there, no?
Okay, okay... fine, I'll do the work. Assuming a nominal depth for the swimming pools of the Olympic minimum of ~1.175 Smoots -- by MIT reckoning -- if I've done the math right:
1 Manhattan is approximately 730 Olympic swimming pools per attoparsec.
(Score: 4, Funny) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:27AM
59.1 km^2 is also equivalent to 591 billion liters per 100km, no? Assuming our Manhattan is pure gasoline (and I've had a couple at cheap bars that taste like it), that's something like 4x10^-10 mpg, which is even worse gas mileage than a Hummer.
With stats that bad, you know this glacial melting must have a connection to climate change...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snotnose on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:54AM
I don't understand. I drink one manhattan, I do the drunk walk for an average of 59^2/ 2 before I get home? I'm so confused.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:07AM (3 children)
asking the important questions I see
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:14AM (1 child)
Incomplete though, we need conversion numbers for Cosmos!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:27AM
It's about 16 Cosmo Kramers...depending on how wacky his day is.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday February 04 2019, @03:27AM
Exactly. No-one even mentions filling the cavity, and the inevitable debate over amalgam vs composite (or porcelain if you want to risk further cracking of the glacier, and don't even mention glod [lspace.org]).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 01 2019, @11:53PM (6 children)
Apparently sea level rise (in m) for a glacier is 0.41 meters per km^3 of melted ice: http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/estimating-glacier-contribution-to-sea-level-rise/ [antarcticglaciers.org]
And there is 1 Gigaton per 1.091 km^3 of ice: https://www.sealevel.info/conversion_factors.html [sealevel.info]
So 14 Gt -> 15.274 km^3 -> 6.26234 meters of sea level rise. Has the sea level risen 6 meters in the last three years?
Where is my error?
(Score: 4, Informative) by bob_super on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:10AM (1 child)
From your link.
> Fretwell et al. 2013 estimated that the Antarctic Ice Sheet comprised 27 million km3 of ice, with a sea level equivalent of ~58 m
Also
>If we took our 458.30 Gt of ice (as calculated above), then we could calculate the global sea level equivalent by: SLE = 1.27 mm
Your error is in the 410mm per km3. That's quite a few orders of magnitude off
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @08:39PM
The table has a typo then:
http://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/estimating-glacier-contribution-to-sea-level-rise/ [antarcticglaciers.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:12AM (2 children)
The only place 0.41 is found is near the top in the table "Table 1. Sea level equivalent (SLE) from various land ice sources. From IPCC AR5 (Vaughan et al, 2013)." which looks like .41m of sea level rise from glaciers and ice caps but not any ice sheets.
At the bottom you'll find their math for estimating the sea level rise.
I have no idea how you decided the 0.41 was m/km^3. If 361.8 Gt = 1mm then 14 gt is .038 mm rise
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 02 2019, @08:42PM (1 child)
Here it defines sea level equivalent
Here is the header of the column in the table (appears to use units of meters):
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:51PM
Yes but that is full meltimg of all the ice specified on the left. Not meters per volume, meters per geologic features.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 02 2019, @05:12AM
Maybe. How much of that glacier was floating before it melted? If it's already floating, melting doesn't raise the sea level, and lots of glaciers are partially on land, and partially floating shelves.
The implication was that it was all on land, and it may have been. But that's a "perhaps".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Saturday February 02 2019, @12:34AM
"Huge Cavity "
Just fill it and put your kids through college: that's what the dentist did when i was a kid.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 02 2019, @03:13PM (1 child)
The size of the melt is alarming. We must stop dumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere; it does retain solar radiation and increase average temperatures in the biosphere. It's why I'm always banging on about electric cars, renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Civilizations collapse when they exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. It will happen to ours, too, if we don't change course now.
In the meantime, it would be cool to build a hidden base in the cavity. I've read people have proposed such things for future off-world settlements, so it would be an opportunity to test out the feasibility of the idea.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Sunday February 03 2019, @01:12AM
It's not just CO2.
There are many other gasses are better insulators than CO2. Methane is ~28 times better thanCO2 at keeping the heat in, Nitrous Oxide is ~275 and the HFCs that were introduced to replace the Ozone destroying CFCs are even worse, 1000 to 10,000s of times worse depending on the gas.
Its the CFC and HFCs we need to put the main focus on. We need to get rid of those. There are alternatives already available, we just need to use them.
*references used;
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warming-potentials [epa.gov]
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions [ourworldindata.org]
https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/our-businesses/cooling/refrigerants-and-energy-efficiency/refrigerants-for-lowering-the-gwp/hydrocarbons/ [danfoss.com]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."