Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Ice - It's in the news
Remember when ice was only important in that you didn't want to run out of it during summer picnics?...
Not too long ago, Lawrence Solomon wrote this in Canada's National Post:
"'Ice sheets do not melt from the surface down -- only at the edges,' Prof. Ollier explains. The modellers' mechanism that has 'meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers.'
In truth, the rate of ice flow now seen in the polar regions does not depend on the present climate, but on the accumulation of ice that occurred in the distant past. Neither is today's warming extraordinary: 'Arctic explorers used to get their ships a lot closer to northern Green-land than you could now,' he explains."
