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Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate!

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Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Empty Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate!

Post by Climate Brink Mon Apr 07, 2014 1:56 pm

This article says it ALL!


STOP Consuming and reduce your carbon footprint!


http://www.rollingstone.com/greenland-melting


Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images; Digital Animation by Francis Oh

Greenland’s ice sheets are disappearing faster than anyone predicted. Climatologist Jason Box has a radical theory why – and even more radical ideas about upending the global-warming science establishment.
By Jeff Goodell

A
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Portrait-xlg
The Ice Maverick

Glaciologist Jason Box, 40, has deep grounding in both climate science and punk rock. “He has one very important quality as a scientist,” says a colleague. “He is willing to say crazy stuff and push the boundaries of conventional wisdom.”

Photo by A. Curry

few weeks ago, on a blue-sky day on the west coast of Greenland, our helicopter swooped along the calving front of the Jakobshavn glacier, flying dangerously close to a 400-foot-high wall of ancient melting ice that stretches for about six miles across Disko Bay. Jakobshavn is the fastest-moving glacier in the world, and it is sliding into the sea at a top speed of 170 feet a day. How quickly this giant slab of ice and snow – and hundreds like it across the North and South Poles – disappears is the biggest uncertainty in the world of climate science. The faster these glaciers melt, the faster seas will rise, inundating cities throughout the world, and the more unpredictable the world’s weather system is likely to become. Our future is written in ice.
The chopper cruised back and forth at the southern edge of the glacier, looking for a patch of open ground that Jason Box, a 40-year-old glaciologist who is leading the expedition, had identified in satellite photos. Box and the pilot exchanged words on the intercom, then Box gave a thumbs up. The chopper touched down on an unremarkable stretch of rocky tundra about the size of a Walmart parking lot, and Box jumped out, followed by a videographer. “Welcome to New Climate Land,” he announced and then launched into a giddy, erudite stand-up monologue for the camera that would have made his high school science teacher proud. “For thousands of years,” he explained, this spot had been covered by a tall building’s worth of ice and snow. But now, in the past few months, the final traces of that ancient ice had disappeared. “We are likely to be the first human beings to ever stand on this piece of ground,” Box said excitedly.
It was all a tad melodramatic, perhaps. But Box doesn’t shy away from bold strokes. As he sees it, the general public has been betrayed by the reluctance of climate researchers to speak about the dangers of climate change with sufficient urgency. For Box, this has never been a problem. In 2009, he announced the Petermann glacier, one of the largest in Greenland, would break up that summer – a potent sign of how fast the Arctic was warming. Most glaciologists thought he was nuts – especially after the summer passed and nothing happened. In 2010, however, Petermann began to calve; two years later, it was shedding icebergs twice the size of Manhattan. Another example: In early 2012, Box predicted there would be surface melting across the entirety of Greenland within a decade. Again, many scientists dismissed this as alarmist claptrap. If anything, Box was too conservative – it happened a few months later. He also believes that the climate community is underestimating how much sea levels could rise in the coming ­decades. When I ask him if he thinks the high-end projections of six feet are too low, he doesn’t hesitate: “excrement, yeah.”
“Jason has one very important quality as a scientist,” says Thomas Painter, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “He is willing to say crazy stuff and push the boundaries of conventional wisdom.”
Though Box had predicted the severity of last summer’s melt, he struggled to understand why so much ice disappeared so quickly. Some climate modelers pointed to changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that pushed up temperatures across the Arctic. Others attributed it to the heat-trapping properties of low clouds. But Box decided to return to Greenland this summer – his 24th trip here in the past 20 years – to test a more startling hypothesis, part of what he calls “a unified theory” of glaciology: that tundra fires in Canada, massive wildfires in Colorado and pollution from coal-fired power plants in Europe and China had sent an unexpectedly thick layer of soot over the Arctic region last summer, which settled onto Greenland’s vast frozen interior, increasing the amount of sunlight the snow and ice absorbed, which in turn accelerated the melting. It was a powerful connection – but was it true? Savvy packager that he is, Box hasn’t just put forth this theory in scientific journals and grant proposals. He’s also branded it: The expedition, called the Dark Snow Project, is the first crowd-sourced scientific research trip to Greenland. “The old ways of doing things aren’t working,” Box tells me one evening. “I want to pursue big ideas, but I also want to communicate them in ways that the public understands. Scientists need to do everything they can to wake people up. It is our job, our moral responsibility.”
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Section2-bg-xlg
The Cruelest Summer
In just one week in July last year, the ice and snow virtually disappeared from the surface of Greenland's barren interior.
Only a few months earlier, when Box predicted this might happen, he was dismissed by many of his fellow scientists as an alarmist.


‘I
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Drilling-xlg
The End of Ice

Box drilling for core samples in Greenland last month. He has made 24 visits to the frozen wasteland. “I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t do everything I could to help people understand the risks we all face.”

t’s hard to get your mind around how fast the Arctic is changing,” said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University. According to NASA, Greenland and Antarctica are losing three times as much ice each year as they did in the 1990s. Summer sea-ice cover is half as big as it was from 1979 to 2000, and many scientists are predicting an ice-free Arctic by the end of the dec­ade. Not so long ago, the Northwest Passage, the storied northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, required an icebreaker ship to navigate it. This summer, people are attempting the passage in a sea kayak.
Ice is melting for a simple reason: “The Arctic is warming faster than any place on Earth,” says Konrad Steffen, a research scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. As the ice vanishes, the region’s albedo, or reflectivity, changes. “Snow is the most reflective substance known in nature,” says Painter. Clean, fresh snow reflects away about 90 percent of the sunlight that hits it. But as the ice softens, its structure changes, lowering the reflectivity and absorbing more heat. As it melts away, more water and land are exposed, both of which are darker, and both of which absorb still more heat. This in turn melts more ice, creating a feedback loop that can accelerate quickly.
Of course, scientists have understood the basic physics of reflectivity for a long time. But the behavior of ice sheets, which are notoriously hard to capture with conventional climate models, can come very close to chaos theory – where small ­changes in the path of the jet stream or the amount of cloud cover can lead to enormous effects. The Great Melt of 2012 was an example of this. “When it happened,” says Michael Mann, director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State, “you had to wonder – what is missing from our models? Is there some basic physics that we don’t understand – or is there a human factor that we are not calculating, like the effects of soot on the snow?”
In Box’s view, glaciologists have spent too much time thinking about the physics of how glaciers move but not enough time thinking about how they melt, and how meltwater – those beautiful turquoise pools in Greenland glaciers – seeps down into crevasses and flows along the base, carrying heat with it, and accelerating the disintegration of the glacier. “Traditional glaciologists tend to be hard-ice guys,” says Box. “They’re not used to thinking about the connection between the atmosphere and ice, and how small changes in temperature and reflectivity can amplify over time.”
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Section3-bg-xlg
Not so long ago, the storied northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean required an icebreaker ship to navigate it.
This summer, people are attempting the passage in a kayak.

With his goatee and gently rebellious manner, Box has the air of a skate punk made good. He was born in Colorado and spent his early years in suburban Denver, where his father worked as a satellite-system engineer for an aerospace company. “He was smart, and he liked to cause trouble,” recalls his older sister Leslie. When Box was about 10, he erected a lightning rod that started a fire in a nearby field. After Box’s parents divorced, his father was transferred overseas – and Box went with him, first to England and then to Innsbruck, Austria, where he was expelled from prep school near the end of his senior year when evidence of marijuana was found in a urine test. “They let me take finals at home, and I graduated anyway,” Box says unabashedly.
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Vid-greenland-xlg
Video

Box discusses the future of Greenland, and the perils and promises posed by its rapidly changing environment.

As a teenager, Box often wore a sleeveless denim jacket, blasted around on a skateboard and listened to bands like the Dead Kennedys, Jane’s Addiction and Judas Priest. He enrolled at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he and his sister played in a garage band called the Sensors (Box played guitar and sang vocals). During gigs, Box liked to decorate the stage with old electronics equipment like oscilloscopes and broken fax machines. “Jason was one of those guys who could drink hard and party at night and then get up early in the morning and go to an intense science class,” Leslie recalls. At Boulder, he bounced from computer science (“too nerdy”) to astronomy (“amazing but not down-to-earth”) to geology (“too slow”). “Then I took a climatology course and saw the Keeling Curve, and that did it,” says Box. The Keeling Curve, named after scientist Charles David Keeling, is the famous graph that measures the rise of ­carbon-dioxide concentrations in the air since 1958, which is the bedrock of ­global-warming science. “I knew the implications were huge,” says Box.
Box took his first trip to Greenland when he was 20 years old. “I remember him walking into my office and saying, ‘I want to go to Greenland with you,’ ” says Steffen, who at that time was a professor at the University of Colorado. Box worked to install and maintain mini weather stations around Greenland and became increasingly interested in how wind, temperature and sunlight affect glaciers. After writing a Ph.D. thesis on how much ice is lost from evaporation

“For most scientists, publishing a paper is a masturbatory act,” Box says. “A few people read it, you feel good, and then it’s over. It has no influence on policymakers; it does nothing to increase public understanding of what is happening to the climate system.”

on Greenland glaciers, Box took a position at Ohio State University, home of the prestigious Byrd Polar Research Center. Then, earlier this year, Box, his wife, Klara, and his young daughter, Astrid, moved to Copenhagen and joined the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, a governmental research institute that has a keen interest in understanding what is going on with the Greenland ice (Greenland, a former province of Denmark, is still a territory of the Danish Kingdom). One of Box’s first tasks was to perfect a computer model that monitors Greenland’s mass ice change in real time; his team also has been involved in helping the Danish government review projects in Greenland that might exploit the melting ice, such as new hydroelectric dams.
“I like ice because it’s nature’s thermometer,” Box tells me over musk-ox pizza at a restaurant in Kangerlussuaq, the base camp for many scientific expeditions onto the Greenland ice sheets. “It’s not political. As the world heats up, ice melts. It’s very simple. It’s the kind of science that everyone can understand.” To Box, the icy island is a perfect laboratory to understand what is happening as CO2 levels rise and the planet warms up. “We are heading into uncharted terrain,” says Box. “We are creating a different climate than the Earth has ever seen before.”
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Slide-xlg
According to
NASA, Greenland
and Antarctica
are losing three times
as much ice each
year as they did
in the 1990s.

Photo by "Asahi Shimbun" / Getty Images

Last summer, box was in a New York airport on his way to Greenland when he saw the first video images of the massive wildfires in Colorado. “It’s a strange feeling, watching your home state burn on TV,” says Box. But it gave him an idea. “Jason called me and said, ‘Do you think soot from wildfires might be affecting ice melt in Greenland?’ ” recalls NASA’s Painter. “I told him that I didn’t know if soot particles were landing there, but it was certainly conceivable, given the circulatory patterns of the Earth’s atmosphere.” A few weeks later, the case for this grew stronger when Box was scanning laser satellite images of Greenland and discovered a cloud of smoke – possibly drifting soot from a wildfire – over the ice.
Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Vid-lakes-xlg
Video

Box discusses the mechanics of melting glaciers.

The idea that soot can have a powerful effect on the melt rate of snow and ice is not new. The godfather of global-warming science, James Hansen, explored the idea in a paper published in 2003, arguing that if soot reduced the reflectivity of Arctic ice by just two percent, it had the same effect on the melt rate of the glacier as a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. What is new is Box’s attempt to link last summer’s Colorado and Canadian wildfires directly with the 2012 meltdown in Greenland – to make a direct connection between a particular fire and a particular melting event.
But Box needed to get to Greenland immediately and measure the reflectivity of the glacier’s surface, as well as collect samples that may contain soot. Box reached out to the National Science Foundation, hoping to get enough funds – about $100,000 from federal research agencies – for a trip to Greenland to test his hypothesis. “It was too late,” says Painter. “All the research funds for the year were gone.”
For Box, it was just another example of the slowness and ineffectiveness of establishment science. “For most scientists, publishing a paper is a masturbatory act,” Box tells me. “A few people read it, you feel good, and then it’s over. It has no influence on ­policymakers; it does nothing to increase public understanding of what is happening to the climate system.”

Get Involved

Box’s recent trip to Greenland was part of what he calls the Dark Snow Project. It was the first such crowd-sourced effort, and it will be, Box hopes, a model for future climate research.

Learn more at:

darksnowproject.org

That’s when he hatched the idea for Dark Snow, threw up a website and asked for donations to help him fund the research that would allow him to answer a simple question: “How much does wildfire and industrial soot darken snow, increasing melt?” By spring 2013, Box raised the money he needed (Jeremy Grantham, the British investor who has long warned that our ­fossil-fuel economy is unsustainable, kicked in $25,000). “It’s a sad commentary on the state of science funding in America when legitimate projects from respected scientists like Jason Box can’t get funded through the normal channels,” says Penn State’s Mann. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a lot more privately funded climate research like this in the future.”

Greenlands Ice Sheet Dissapearing at an ALARMING Rate! Section5-bg-xlg
The first day we arrived in Greenland, our helicopter pilot was nowhere to be found. And without a helicopter, it was virtually impossible to get out onto the glaciers to begin fieldwork. So Box and the rest of the team, including Marek Stibal, a biologist who is also with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, spent the day knocking around Kangerlussuaq, which is little more than an old military airfield at the edge of the ice sheets. Stibal was along to explore the radical notion that the dark-colored microbes that live on the surface of glaciers might have a significant effect on the reflectivity of the ice. And like soot, they may be accelerating the melt rate of the glacier. “I do not know if this is true,” Stibal tells me. “But I’d like to find out.” Box believes the microbes might in fact be feeding off phosphorus deposited on the ice from industrial air pollution – yet another way that humans are speeding the meltdown of the planet. With no fieldwork to do, Box and his videographer spend a few hours taping Box in front of a bridge that was washed out last summer by massive meltwater runoff from the glaciers. Then we walk a mile or so to a restaurant that serves musk-ox steak, smoked halibut and whale carpaccio. Box is clearly impatient with the delay – the clock was ticking, and every hour we spent on solid ground felt like an hour wasted. The next morning, after a flurry of phone calls, we flew up the coast to Ilulissat, where an Air Greenland Bell 212 helicopter was waiting. We buzzed over the Jakobshavn glacier, touched down on New Climate Land, then went in search of dark snow.

“Give me two and a half million dollars,” he told me, “and I could change the world.”

Because we didn’t have time to fly to the best spot on the glacier to gather soot samples, Box decided to pursue Stibal’s microbes. Earlier, they had identified a likely spot on the ice with satellite imagery – Box checked the coordinates with the pilot, and we flew off in that direction. After 20 minutes or so of flying over the ice, we hovered above a turquoise meltwater lake while Box and Stibal talked over the helicopter’s intercom. The snow was indeed darker here, graying into the distance. The helicopter touched down gently. Stibal, at first glance, seemed disappointed. He poked around on the surface of the glacier, a vast plain of ice that is, up close, surprisingly complex, with pooling water and crevasses and glinting colors of blue and white. “It’s a bit early in the year for the microbes,” Stibal said, but then he explored further and pointed to a pattern of blackish-colored holes in the snow. “This looks interesting,” he said. He walked back to the helicopter and grabbed some canisters and pumps and spent the next hour collecting samples as well as taking measurements of the chemical properties of the meltwater.
While he worked, Box and I talked about how he keeps his balance, knowing the many flavors of catastrophe the world faces as it rapidly warms. “I am a scientist – I try not to get emotional about it,” he said, although he admitted that one of the reasons he took the job in Denmark is because he believes it’s a safer place for his daughter, who is 21 months old, to ride out the storms of the future. “On the other hand, I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t do everything I could to help people understand the risks we all face.”
As it turns out, this summer, Greenland’s glaciers are heating up at a pace that’s substantially below last year’s record melt – a fact that Box says “just adds complexity” to what is going on in the Arctic. It will be months before he can analyze the ice cores and Stibal’s microbe samples to determine if they contain any important new insights. But good science is about meaningfully increasing the sum of human knowledge, and by that measure, Dark Snow will likely turn out to be a success. Later that night, after Box had a few sips of Greenlandic whiskey, he talked about his dream of forming a Climate Delta Force, funded by philanthropists, which could be dispatched to study climate catastrophes in real time. “Give me two and a half million dollars,” he told me, “and I could change the world.”

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/greenland-melting#ixzz2yDyzElTD
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Climate Brink
Climate Brink

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