76 comments on Polar ice cap
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
76 comments on Polar ice cap
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
- An interview with Stoneleigh - the case for deflation
- The Future of European Transport: iTREN-2030
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”
—Gandhi
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
Removal of floating sea ice will not impact sea level but will change the albedo and result in greater warming.
There is the danger of futher positive amplification of this warming trend due to the release of GHG from the once frozen arctic tundra.
The Greenland ice cap is not floating. Scientific opinion is changing with regard to impacts. It was believed that increased warming would result in increased snowfall and sequestration of water in the Greenland ice cap. Current data shows continued abalation of the ice cap and glaciation retreat. This would contribute to significant sea level rise.
Likewise the albedo thing doesn't seem the major issue; the poles are very cloudy anyway.
I expect the real positive feedback is in the changing ratio of surface area to mass of the ice as it melts. Surface area decreases with the square, mass with the cube (pardon!), so the less ice, the faster it retreats. I suppose this is why we're seeing so much greater warming at the poles.
I suppose then the problem is the loss of heat sink. The phase change of melting ice soaks up a lot of heat. As the ice shrinks that sink goes away.
To dramatize this my old physics teacher would set a paper cup full of water on top of a bunsen burner. The cup sits there happily ignoring the blue flame underneath it right up to the point that the last of its contents is gone. Then it ignites.
So we may expect that more equatorial regions of the globe won't experience the full effect of warming until the polar ice is gone. At which point ... well, I'm too busy moving to Tasmania to think about it.
I would it expect it to suffer severly from changes to the Antartic.
It is not just the Artic that is changing