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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, 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...