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We recently watched a 2004 film called The Day After Tomorrow, after
which we read about a substantial chunk of Antarctic ice shelf falling
into the ocean. It was about 1,255 miles square--around the size of
Rhode Island. A similar sized chunk, possibly intended to represent
same because they referred to it as being roughly the size of R.I.
State, was well staged as slipping into the Antarctic in the film. New
York in a deep freeze is particularly chilling. The story begins much
like this article from The Guardian: PART OF ATLANTIC CURRENT HALTED FOR TEN DAYS ALARMING SCIENTISTS JAMES RANDERSON, GUARDIAN - Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modelers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic. Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004. . . Warm water brought to Europe's shores raises the temperature by as much as 10C in some places and without it the continent would be much colder and drier. Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the 10-day hiatus. "We'd never seen anything like that before and we don't understand it. We didn't know it could happen," said Harry Bryden, at the National Oceanography Centre, in Southampton, who presented the findings to a conference in Birmingham on rapid climate change. Is it the first sign that the current is stuttering to a halt? "I want to know more before I say that," Professor Bryden said. Lloyd Keigwin, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, in the US, described the temporary shutdown as "the most abrupt change in the whole [climate] record". He added: "It only lasted 10 days. But suppose it lasted 30 or 60 days, when do you ring up the prime minister and say let's start stockpiling fuel? How can we rule out a longer one next year?" http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1932761,00.html [The Review reported this possibility back in the 1990s] ************************************************************************ REUTERS - Scientists said that they had found the first direct evidence linking the collapse of an ice shelf in Antarctica to global warming widely blamed on human activities. Shifts in winds whipping around the southern Ocean, tied to human emissions of greenhouse gases, had warmed the Antarctic peninsula jutting up toward South America and contributed to the break-up of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, they said. "This is the first time that anyone has been able to demonstrate a physical process directly linking the break-up of the Larsen Ice Shelf to human activity," said Gareth Marshall, lead author of the study at the British Antarctic Survey. The chunk that collapsed into the Weddell Sea in 2002 was 3,250 sq kms (1,255 sq miles), bigger than Luxembourg or the U.S. state of Rhode Island. http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-10-16T181210Z_01_L16585452_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-ICE.xml&WTmod Lo c=NewsHome-C3-scienceNews-3 |
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