SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
posted by
on Sunday April 02 2017, @04:28PM
from the visit-the-scenic-algae-blooms-of-Antartica dept.
from the visit-the-scenic-algae-blooms-of-Antartica dept.
When spring arrives in the Arctic, both snow and sea ice melt, forming melt ponds on the surface of the sea ice. Every year, as global warming increases, there are more and larger melt ponds.
Melt ponds provide more light and heat for the ice and the underlying water, but now it turns out that they may also have a more direct and potentially important influence on life in the Arctic waters.
Mats of algae and bacteria can evolve in the melt ponds, which can provide food for marine creatures. This is the conclusion of researchers in the periodical, Polar Biology.
More information:
Heidi Louise Sørensen et al. Nutrient availability limits biological production in Arctic sea ice melt ponds, Polar Biology (2017). DOI: 10.1007/s00300-017-2082-7
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Melting Sea Ice May Lead to More Life in the Sea
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 39 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
sillema sillema nika su
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02 2017, @05:55PM (25 children)
I recently heard a recording[1] of Jim White, PhD from over a decade ago.
The presentation is as informative now as it was prescient when it was initially delivered.
One degree Celsius of atmospheric temperature rise equates [google.com] to 20 meters of sea level rise.
(It's not a linear thing but it's a useful approximation.)
400ppm of atmospheric CO2 equates [google.com] to one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The monitoring station in Hawaii has already detected this level.
[1] TUC Radio (Time of Useful Consciousness) [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Sunday April 02 2017, @06:54PM (22 children)
One degree Celsius of atmospheric temperature rise equates to 20 meters of sea level rise. (It's not a linear thing but it's a useful approximation.)
Did Jim White, PhD ever explain why present sea level rise is two orders of magnitude shy of his predictions?
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday April 02 2017, @07:36PM (5 children)
Did Jim White, PhD ever explain why present sea level rise is two orders of magnitude shy of his predictions?
If there is going to be a betting pool about this, I would like to sign up for the "No, he didn't" position.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fritsd on Sunday April 02 2017, @08:04PM (4 children)
I don't have money to bet, but my guess would be the following analogy:
It's winter, and your bed is freezing cold, and you are a bit stupid and put all 10 of your blankets on top of your bed.
You close the window, take off your clothes and crawl in your bed.
The bed is freezing cold! The 10 blankets don't seem to have worked yet at all!
But don't worry: you'll slowly warm up, and then you'll slowly cook yourself, in a few hours, when a new thermal equilibrium due to incoming & outgoing radiation has been reached.
---
The CO2 blanket works very fast, on a geological scale (timescale of the Milankovic(sp?) cycles, say), because of the heat capacity [wikipedia.org] of the atmosphere and oceans (I've forgotten the different definitions of heat capacity, C_p and C_v, but I remember that it was very different for gases, liquids and solids). Will still take a few hundred years for the full effect of the new "steady-state".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 03 2017, @12:26AM (3 children)
Will still take a few hundred years for the full effect of the new "steady-state".
Even if we buy that, it still means that we should be seeing significant effect now rather than two orders of magnitude less. The last few decades should be enough to see a significant effect, not some convenient far future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @03:46AM (1 child)
My initial thought is that you aren't considering alternative factors, and Jim White probably did not specify or account for the full system. The excess heat in the atmosphere is being absorbed by all the glaciers and arctic ice. I haven't done the math myself but the 20m sea rise predictions seem pretty far fetched, but as I said I haven't done the math.
My point is that the 1 degree increase is probably referring to the total system after equilibrium is reached, and currently we're in the transition period where the effects of all the extra heat are being mitigated quite a lot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 03 2017, @05:21AM
My initial thought is that you aren't considering alternative factors, and Jim White probably did not specify or account for the full system. The excess heat in the atmosphere is being absorbed by all the glaciers and arctic ice. I haven't done the math myself but the 20m sea rise predictions seem pretty far fetched, but as I said I haven't done the math.
White probably didn't account for most of the northern ice sheet being missing.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday April 03 2017, @12:05PM
Maybe at the moment we're seeing the tail-end of the effect upto the Rococo period [wikipedia.org], the full blast of the effect of when men in London wore stovepipe hats and moths evolved to prefer stylish black [wikipedia.org], and the beginning of the effect of the recent 120 years.
P.S. I just read that moth Wiki article; I had no idea that there was a religious controversy about it; I think I read the story about 30 years ago before Wikipedia was "a thing".
P.P.S. I haven't thought deeply on how to integrate CO2 concentration over time to calculate warming up effect, neither have I looked the procedure up in AR5 report WG1, so I just pulled "rococo period" and "1850s-1890s" out off my ass. I do vagely remember a brother of my granny wearing an actual stovepipe hat at my grandfather's funeral, but that was last century, not 2 centuries ago. And their albedo effect can probably be ignored in the noise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02 2017, @07:57PM (5 children)
obviously, there can be no delay.
I mean, the equinox is right smack in the middle of spring because the longest day is the hottest day of the year, and the shortest day is the coldest day of the year. because all variables of all dynamical systems react instantly to changes in the other variables.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Sunday April 02 2017, @08:02PM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 02 2017, @08:08PM (3 children)
Why do you expect scientists to waste time on your questions? They are busy, and it is all open source ... http://forge.ipsl.jussieu.fr/igcmg/browser [jussieu.fr]
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Sunday April 02 2017, @11:49PM (2 children)
Why do you expect scientists to waste time on your questions?
Because that is their job. It's not just to do sciency stuff, it's also to communicate in a clear and honest way what they have discovered.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @03:50AM (1 child)
They have, it isn't their fault that a lot of uneducated fools (and greedy bastards deliberately casting doubt) are too ignorant / stubborn to understand.
Some of the most basic facts are staring us in the face, the last decade has seen extreme weather patterns and record after record of "hottest year" being broken. Yet here we are, discussing these same facts with someone praying that the naysayers will get a clue and stop blocking others from trying to prepare for future hard times.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 03 2017, @05:24AM
They have, it isn't their fault that a lot of uneducated fools (and greedy bastards deliberately casting doubt) are too ignorant / stubborn to understand.
That's a fine line of bullshit, but it doesn't address the inability of certain scientists to rationally explain their work.
Some of the most basic facts are staring us in the face, the last decade has seen extreme weather patterns and record after record of "hottest year" being broken.
Even if/when that is true, so what? You need more facts than that, even when your facts really are facts.
Yet here we are, discussing these same facts with someone praying that the naysayers will get a clue and stop blocking others from trying to prepare for future hard times.
So you understand how I feel now.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday April 02 2017, @08:04PM (9 children)
It's called equilibrium. Similarly, turning the flame up on a pot of water doesn't instantly raise the temperature of the water appreciably.
In a system the size of Earth, it's going to take centuries before the new equilibrium temperature is reached.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 02 2017, @11:47PM (8 children)
In a system the size of Earth, it's going to take centuries before the new equilibrium temperature is reached.
Even so, we should be seeing more actual sea level change now not some convenient far future. After all, at least half the predicted temperature change has already happened.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @04:01AM (1 child)
I said this point in another comment above but I'm late to this party soooo one more time!
Most likely Jim White was referring to 1 degree change in equilibrium temperature and we are currently in the midst of that equilibrium change. Glaciers have retreated and sea ice isn't as pervasive, but we haven't yet seen their full disappearance. If this heat buildup continues then we will run out of ice to melt, and once it is all melted we will see some appreciable sea level rise. I am very skeptical about a 20m (60+ feet!) rise in sea level, the oceans are incredibly massive and I just can't quite see it, but as I said above I haven't done the math.
On that note, I also wonder how much water makes its way down into all the areas that were once filled with oil.
Long story short: picking away at one person's model to try and bolster a weak viewpoint is lame especially when you don't address the various factors that many others have brought up. It smacks of laziness and insincerity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 03 2017, @05:41AM
On that note, I also wonder how much water makes its way down into all the areas that were once filled with oil.
None except through human action. Oil wouldn't be there in the first place, if there was a path for surface water to make its way down. Oil is not only less dense than water, it is much less dense than crust materials. It only exists in situations where it has been generated and trapped by an impermeable layer. That prevents ground water from flowing down to it.
But having said that, the most popular way to pump out oil is to pump in water or a water-based mud. I recall calculating the volume of oil ever pumped would fit in a cube 5 km on a side. Even if every drop of oil was replaced underground with water of the same volume, that is an insignificant amount of the Earth's water (even the fresh water on Earth is around 10 million cubic km [usgs.gov] and that is a source which is continually replenished).
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday April 03 2017, @06:22AM (5 children)
> After all, at least half the predicted temperature change has already happened.
Whose prediction are you alluding to? Or are you referring to the goal of the Paris agreement?
The IPCC attempts to predict through the end of this century under various scenarios; the graph of their predictions shows, for some of those scenarios, a trend of continued or even increasing warming up until the end of the century. They predict warming of at most 6.4 degrees Celsius between 1980 and 2099, and sea level rise of at most 59 cm over the same period.
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html#table-spm-3 [www.ipcc.ch]
https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-spm-5.html [www.ipcc.ch]
(Score: 3, Informative) by WalksOnDirt on Monday April 03 2017, @06:53AM
AR4 projections of sea level rise were almost certainly too low. They ignored glacial melting since it wasn't really known. The revised figures for AR5 were 26-82 cm. 2100 is not nearly long enough for the sea level to reach equilibrium even if we held greenhouse gasses steady, which we have no hope of doing for decades.
Not that I think even 82 cm would be that bad if it happens over 83 years. The bigger threats are droughts and ocean acidification.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 03 2017, @12:48PM (3 children)
> After all, at least half the predicted temperature change has already happened.
Whose prediction are you alluding to? Or are you referring to the goal of the Paris agreement?
They estimate 3 C of long term warming per doubling of CO2 concentration in atmosphere which I think is too high. Currently, we're experiencing more like 1.5 C. And much of the future warming predicted is for CO2 emissions that have yet to happen.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday April 03 2017, @03:02PM (2 children)
Currently we've seen around a 30% increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution began, with most of that having been added in the last handful of decades. Meanwhile it will take centuries for the planet to reach a new equilibrium state, so most of the warming we're currently seeing is due do the CO2 levels from many decades ago.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:29AM (1 child)
Currently we've seen around a 30% increase in CO2 since the industrial revolution began, with most of that having been added in the last handful of decades. Meanwhile it will take centuries for the planet to reach a new equilibrium state, so most of the warming we're currently seeing is due do the CO2 levels from many decades ago.
So what? The IPCC has already claimed that would about 1.1 C (using the 3 C temperature sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 and your 30% increase in CO2). What makes your opinion better than theirs or mine? Nor is it relevant that "the planet" takes a while to reach equilibrium since most of the change would happen long before we get bored and declare equilibrium (ignoring of course, that the climate changes often enough on that equilibrium never would be achieved).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:34AM
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday April 03 2017, @05:43AM
> The monitoring station in Hawaii has already detected this level.
Yes, in 2013.
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/7992 [ucsd.edu]
Current readings are a little higher:
Recent Monthly Average Mauna Loa CO2
February 2017: 406.42 ppm
February 2016: 404.04 ppm
-- https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ [noaa.gov]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday April 03 2017, @03:01PM
What's the latency time before this 400 ppm => one Celsius => 20 meter sets in?