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The largest of the great lakes in the United States, Lake Superior
Lake Superior’s ice coverage has greatly surpassed expectations this year.
Earlier in the season, forecasters predicted the lake would reach a little more than 50 percent ice coverage this winter. But as of Friday, Lake Superior was over 85 percent covered, far exceeding the prediction and the lake’s long-term average of 55 percent, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, or GLERL.
This year’s frigid conditions triggered the rapid expansion of the ice that exceeded predictions, said Jia Wang, a research ice climatologist and physical oceanographer at GLERL.
[...] Earlier this week, ice coverage increased about 10 percent within 12 hours, rising from around 75 percent at 2 p.m. Wednesday to nearly 85 percent by 2 a.m. Thursday.
[...] The last time the lake ice reached 100 percent coverage was 1996, which is the only time 100 percent coverage on Lake Superior has been noted since records started in 1973, according to GLERL data.
[Updated to fix title; changed "Exceeds 90 Percent" to be "Exceeds 85 Percent". --martyb]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday March 07 2019, @06:02PM (1 child)
"Eventually" is the key term.
What a lot of people don't seem to understand, is that we're actually in a cold period now - and have been for the last 2.6 million years (around the time our species evolved into Homo Habilis). Not a full on glacial period, we're currently in an interglacial period, but still firmly in theEarth's "icehouse" state. And yes, so long as we remain here, we're due to return to a glacial period. We've been lucky - the last peak in our orbital Milankovitch cycle was unusually small, otherwise it likely would have triggered a glacial period Earth, instead we've got a few thousand more years until the next full-sized peak.
The most severe risk with global warming is that there's a very real chance that global we could warm things up enough to trigger the runaway process to tip things out of the icehouse state, back to the "hothouse" state it was in when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth. That does away with the icecaps and glacial periods entirely, but seems to involve far less stable climates than an interglacial period.
More worryingly, even if we avoid the tipping point (and we're not sure exactly where it's at - we might be in little immediate danger, or we might already have crossed it) we're on track to warm the planet dramatically faster than normally happens - to accomplish in centuries what normally takes millenia. And in general, the faster the climate changes, the harder it is on the ecosystem. And by extension, the harder it is on us overpopulated humans that are already balancing tenuously on top of an ecosystem that can't sustainably provide enough biological resources to keep up with our demand.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2019, @10:08PM
Unlike you I am far more worried about real threats not some maybe few thousand years form now. Real threats are, as always, the Communists, and the public's insistance on giving them fucking power.