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A major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study finds.
The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier around 2012 was retreating about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) and thinning nearly 130 feet (almost 40 meters) annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience . Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”
Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation — a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Nino in the Pacific.
While this is “good news” on a temporary basis, this is bad news on the long term because it tells scientists that ocean temperature is a bigger player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought, said NASA climate scientist Josh Willis, a study co-author. Over the decades the water has been and will be warming from man-made climate change, he said, noting that about 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the oceans.
https://www.apnews.com/b19abfb0a0534b51925aa121806255a8
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @08:18AM (4 children)
and "this is bad news on the long term"
Wow. You can tell these people are motivated to believe. They love to tell the rest of us things like this:
"It's hard to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it"
...believing that all of us fossil fuel burners are ignoring problems for money, but can't see that it applies to them. They were all convinced that the melting was ecological doom due to our evil carbon-using ways, but when the whole foundation of their argument is destroyed (by the glacier growth) they refuse to admit they were wrong. Instead, they double down. Had the glacier kept melting, or just stopped, they would have also kept at the propaganda. It's a matter of funding to be Chicken Little.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday March 29 2019, @08:44AM (1 child)
Is there climate change? Yeah. Will it go back like this, I mean will it change back? Probably. It goes up and it goes down. Like a twitch of the eye -- or perhaps another body part.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday March 29 2019, @05:43PM
There has always been climate change even billions of years before man existed, and there will always be climate change going forward with or without mans influence.
Humanities skill is in adaptation. If your goal is to keep everything the same forever then you will lose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
Another ignoramus opens their mouth. Once again local phenomena do not indicate a global pattern. I sure hope the rising temps are slowing down / stopping, but I'm not going to make such a speculative claim based on this. It is just as likely that the increased melting of the poles has sucked up enough heat in the oceans to cause this temporary slowdown, and when that heat sink is gone you can expect the warming to pick up the pace.
Again, I hope for a slowdown of the global heat rise but I'm not blinded by whatever the fuck you are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 30 2019, @03:46AM
Translation: "Trump is cooling the earth, that is bad somehow."