Hot Holes in the Oceans

Hot Holes in the Oceans

The Ice Man Goeth

I’ve blogged a lot about the impact of pollution and climate change on our great bodies of water. From the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (620,000 square miles of mostly floating plastics), the “dead zones” around major seaports and the dying coral reefs to the rising temperatures of Gulf waters feeding increasingly intense hurricanes and coastal erosion that claims millions of acres annually. With over 70% of the Earth’s surface covered by water, we know surprising little about the linkage of vast bodies of seawater to each other and to the land they abut. The obvious problem with dealing with this inadequate body of knowledge is, literally, that it is mostly underwater! Vast, massive and not readily visible without a lot of specialized equipment, scientists… and how thinly deployed these all are.

But if one of the primary metrics for the impact of climate change is the speed at which ice everywhere, from polar ice caps to glacier failure to the desiccation of mountain lakes and rivers, is melting away. Greenland is an excellent laboratory (morgue/cemetery?) for this accelerating demise of glacial ice, we have some metrics that we seem to be ignoring. We have been assuming that the primary heat for climate change is coming from the rising average air temperatures around the world, but we are learning that the uneven spread of hotter ocean water is increasingly the root cause of much of this melting.

It's not pretty. “The melt rate in a portion of Petermann Glacier [above] was 50% higher in the last three years than it was in 2016-19. This acceleration may be occurring at other glaciers, raising questions about global melt projections… Daily tides stoked with increasingly warm water have eaten a hole taller than the Washington Monument at the bottom of one of Greenland’s major glaciers in the last couple of years, accelerating the retreat of a crucial portion, a study found.

“Scientists worry that the phenomenon isn’t limited to this one glacier, raising questions about previous projections of melting rates on the world’s vulnerable ice sheets… The rapid melt seen in this study took place in the far northwest of Greenland, on Petermann Glacier. If it is happening in the rest of Greenland and the larger Antarctic ice sheet, then global ice loss and the sea level rise could jump as much as twice as quickly as previously thought, according to the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences… ‘It’s bad news,’ said study author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at UC Irvine. ‘We know the current projections are too conservative. We know that they have a really hard time matching the current [melt] record.’” Associated Press, May 9th.

As anyone who has walked across black asphalt on a hot summer’s day knows, darker surfaces attract and hold heat. Lighter surfaces have the opposite effect. Lots of commercial building owners have taken to repainting their roofs white for precisely that reason: to reflect heat away from the structure, cheap but effective.

With this reality in mind, look at the above photograph. According to the January 25, 2021, Scientific American, “The world’s frozen places are shrinking—and they’re disappearing at faster rates as time goes by… In the 1990s, the world was losing around 800 billion metric tons of ice each year. Today, that number has risen to around 1.2 trillion tons… Altogether, the planet lost a whopping 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017.” But as the above study in Greenland points out, that meltdown is accelerating. In short, there is vastly less white heat reflective surface ice and comparably more dark land and ocean matter that is absorbing heat. It is a vicious circle that feeds on itself.

Take that one giant step forward. Concentrate on areas in Siberia and Northern Canada where there are millions of square miles of permafrost (tundra), effectively dead plant and animal life buried frozen since before even the ice age. As that organic material defrosts, the residue of eons of years of decay releases in the form of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 24 times as dense as carbon dioxide. As more methane creates more heat that rises into the atmosphere, more permafrost melts… and…. it is a vicious circle that feeds on itself. And if we have enough of such vicious circles, we pass that magical tipping point where mankind’s cutback on greenhouse emissions no longer can stop the beast.

With the oceans being so vast, are we even running the right numbers in our projections of the impact of climate change? Meanwhile, back on Greenland: “‘When you are standing on that shelf or sleeping on the shelf, you hear noise all the time, loud noises from deep inside cracks forming,’ Rignot said. ‘That’s where the concept of a glacier being alive starts getting to you.’

“Greenland ice researcher Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who wasn’t part of the research, called Rignot’s technique clever and said the study makes sense, showing ‘that ocean heat delivery to tidewater glacier grounding lines represents a potent destabilizing effect.’… Box, who uses a different technique to calculate how much ice is no longer being fed by glaciers and is doomed to melt, something called ‘zombie ice,’ figures that 434 billion metric tons of ice on Petermann are already committed to melting.

“The study provides strong evidence that models need to include these tidal effects deep inland, and if they don’t, they are underestimating future sea level rise, said Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Richard Alley, who was not part of the Rignot study.” AP We can put our collective heads in the sand, or water, complain about the unaffordability of containing climate change and pay a hundred times more in hard dollar losses from so many forms of climate-related devastation, count the millions of people and trillions of animals that will die and endure the sheer misery of our relative inaction.

I’m Peter Dekom, and given my age, it is my son and his children and theirs, and theirs… if there are any… who will pay the price for our colossal stupidity based on greed and hubris.