November 8, 2017

SCIENCE: Hot Rock Under Antarctica May Be Melting Some Of Its Ice Sheets From The Bottom-Up. Not 'May', IS. It's Called NATURE. Al Gore Getting Rich Off Of His Abhorrent Population Control LIE.

Business Insider
written by Dave Mosher
Wednesday November 8, 2017

Antarctica today takes a lot of heat from above, thanks to two hundred years of carbon-belching human activity and the warming this has caused. [<= This is the bullcrap Al Gore and other uber wealthy people want humanity to believe. When in fact, all of their solutions lead to massive population control, unnatural genetically modified everything, and distribution of wealth to chronically poor corrupt Marxist nations worldwide. (emphasis mine)]

An increasing number of researchers also think the frozen Southern Continent faces significant warming from below: Hot rock pluming upward through Earth's mantle, leaking heat through the crust, and melting the bottoms of Antarctic ice sheets.

The effect, first proposed 30 years ago, seems especially strong in West Antarctica, where ice sheets losses are most dramatic and contributing to sea-level rise. But few scientists believed this was happening, at least initially.

"I thought it was crazy," Hélène Seroussi, a climatologist and ice researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. "I didn't see how we could have that amount of heat and still have ice on top of it."

However, a new study by Seroussi and others now backs up the idea of a hot mantle plume — and the melting it causes — with advanced computer modeling.

The work was published September 1 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

Rising from the depths
Antarctica's system of sub-glacial lakes (light-blue dots) and rivers (dark-blue lines). The Marie Byrd Land Dome (red arrow) sits below West Antarctica. NSF/Zina Deretsky
Earth's internal heat is always warming up the ground, including rock under ice sheets all over the planet. While this partially melts them from below, snow and ice accumulation on top is usually enough to balance out these losses.

Over the years, however, researchers who study Antarctic ice melt have detailed an anomaly at West Antarctica. There, ice sheet thinning is more drastic than anywhere else on the continent, according to satellite data.

Since the industrial revolution, the North and South Poles have warmed at a rate many times faster than other locations on Earth. In Antarctica, this is melting ice sheets from above and pooling water on top of them — possibly helping carve off Delaware-size icebergs.

But a warming climate does not fully explain Antarctica's mounting ice loss. So in recent years, researchers have looked deeper for an answer.

Hiding under the ice
One line of research has discovered, documented, and even drilled into and explored a vast system of sub-glacial lakes and rivers.

This water helps lubricate the movement of ice sheets from the snowy mountains to the sea — and certain parts of the Southern Continent, where there's a lot of sub-glacial water — are moving and melting faster than others.

Scientists have also dug into the mystery of a bulge in Earth's crust below West Antarctica, called the Marie Byrd Land Dome. At first, it was thought the crust was thicker there. But earthquake-like seismic measurements disproved that idea.

Something else is buoying the region, and recent seismic imaging — essentially 3D-radar for Earth's crust and mantle — suggests there's a warm plume of rock below West Antarctica. (Just as sound waves travel slower through liquids than solids, seismic waves slow down when encountering hotter, more gooey, and less-dense rock.)
Since this could just be an irregularity in the mantle, Seroussi and her colleagues borrowed from a computer model used to simulate the giant plume of hot rock below Yellowstone National Park.

Researchers plugged in all of the known physics about the mantle, Antarctica, and its ice sheets — including their changing altitude, movement, friction caused by that movement, melting rates, and more — and produced dozens of simulations, according to NASA JPL.

Those simulations showed that heat spilling from a hot mantle plume could be up to three times greater than it is for a normal, non-volcanic chunk of mantle below the US. And compared to mantle below Yellowstone, the heat output could be 75% that of the volcanically active region.

When the researchers compared that heat output to basal (or bottom) melt rates in Antarctica, no places matched — except for West Antarctica. At that location, a crack or rift in the crust may be allowing heat to rapidly escape upward, the researchers wrote in their study.

"Without a plume-like heating source," they said, "our simulations show that intrinsic heating and crustal sources do not provide enough energy to generate significant amounts of basal meltwater."

NASA JPL
Tuesday November 7, 2017

Study Bolsters Theory of Heat Source Under West Antarctica

A new NASA study adds evidence that a geothermal heat source called a mantle plume lies deep below Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land, explaining some of the melting that creates lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. Although the heat source isn't a new or increasing threat to the West Antarctic ice sheet, it may help explain why the ice sheet collapsed rapidly in an earlier era of rapid climate change, and why it is so unstable today.

The stability of an ice sheet is closely related to how much water lubricates it from below, allowing glaciers to slide more easily. Understanding the sources and future of the meltwater under West Antarctica is important for estimating the rate at which ice may be lost to the ocean in the future.

Antarctica's bedrock is laced with rivers and lakes, the largest of which is the size of Lake Erie. Many lakes fill and drain rapidly, forcing the ice surface thousands of feet above them to rise and fall by as much as 20 feet (6 meters). The motion allows scientists to estimate where and how much water must exist at the base.

Some 30 years ago, a scientist at the University of Colorado Denver suggested that heat from a mantle plume under Marie Byrd Land might explain regional volcanic activity and a topographic dome feature. Very recent seismic imaging has supported this concept. When Hélène Seroussi of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, first heard the idea, however, "I thought it was crazy," she said. "I didn't see how we could have that amount of heat and still have ice on top of it."

With few direct measurements existing from under the ice, Seroussi and Erik Ivins of JPL concluded the best way to study the mantle plume idea was by numerical modeling. They used the Ice Sheet System Model (ISSM), a numerical depiction of the physics of ice sheets developed by scientists at JPL and the University of California, Irvine. Seroussi enhanced the ISSM to capture natural sources of heating and heat transport from freezing, melting and liquid water; friction; and other processes.

To assure the model was realistic, the scientists drew on observations of changes in the altitude of the ice sheet surface made by NASA's IceSat satellite and airborne Operation IceBridge campaign. "These place a powerful constraint on allowable melt rates -- the very thing we wanted to predict," Ivins said. Since the location and size of the possible mantle plume were unknown, they tested a full range of what was physically possible for multiple parameters, producing dozens of different simulations.

They found that the flux of energy from the mantle plume must be no more than 150 milliwatts per square meter. For comparison, in U.S. regions with no volcanic activity, the heat flux from Earth's mantle is 40 to 60 milliwatts. Under Yellowstone National Park -- a well-known geothermal hot spot -- the heat from below is about 200 milliwatts per square meter averaged over the entire park, though individual geothermal features such as geysers are much hotter.

Seroussi and Ivins' simulations using a heat flow higher than 150 milliwatts per square meter showed too much melting to be compatible with the space-based data, except in one location: an area inland of the Ross Sea known for intense flows of water. This region required a heat flow of at least 150-180 milliwatts per square meter to agree with the observations. However, seismic imaging has shown that mantle heat in this region may reach the ice sheet through a rift, that is, a fracture in Earth's crust such as appears in Africa's Great Rift Valley.

Mantle plumes are thought to be narrow streams of hot rock rising through Earth's mantle and spreading out like a mushroom cap under the crust. The buoyancy of the material, some of it molten, causes the crust to bulge upward. The theory of mantle plumes was proposed in the 1970s to explain geothermal activity that occurs far from the boundary of a tectonic plate, such as Hawaii and Yellowstone.

The Marie Byrd Land mantle plume formed 50 to 110 million years ago, long before the West Antarctic ice sheet came into existence. At the end of the last ice age around 11,000 years ago, the ice sheet went through a period of rapid, sustained ice loss when changes in global weather patterns and rising sea levels pushed warm water closer to the ice sheet -- just as is happening today. Seroussi and Ivins suggest the mantle plume could facilitate this kind of rapid loss.

Their paper, "Influence of a West Antarctic mantle plume on ice sheet basal conditions," was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.
Fox News Science
written by Staff
February 7, 2017

A key Obama administration scientist brushed aside inconvenient data that showed a slowdown in global warming in compiling an alarming 2015 report that coincided with the White House participation in the Paris Climate Conference, a whistle blower is alleging.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a major 2013 report, concluded global temperatures had shown a smaller increase from 1998 to 2012 than any similar period over the past 30 to 60 years. But a blockbuster, June 2015 paper by a team of federal scientists led by Thomas Karl, published in the journal Science in June 2015 and later known as the “pausebuster" paper sought to discredit the notion of a slowdown in warming.

"Our new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century," Karl, who was at the time director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said at the time.

The report argued that evidence shows there was no “hiatus” in rising global temperatures and that they had been increasing in the 21st century just as quickly as in the last half of the 20th century.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science Committee, questioned the timing, noting the paper was published just before the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan was submitted to the Paris Climate Conference of 2015.

"In the summer of 2015, whistleblowers alerted the Committee that the Karl study was rushed to publication before underlying data issues were resolved to help influence public debate about the so-called Clean Power Plan and upcoming Paris climate conference," Smith said in a statement. "Since then, the Committee has attempted to obtain information that would shed further light on these allegations, but was obstructed at every turn by the previous administration’s officials."

Karl denied the paper was released to boost the plan.

Karl’s neglect of the IPCC data was purposeful, according to John Bates, a recently retired scientist from the National Climactic Data Center at the NOAA. Bates came forward just days ago to charge that the 2015 study selectively used misleading and unverified data – effectively putting NOAA’s thumb on the scale.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Bates said Karl was “insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”

For example, Karl allegedly adjusted temperature data collected by robot buoys upward to match earlier data from ocean-going ships. That was problematic, Bates said, because ships generate heat and could cause readings to vary.

“They had good data from buoys,” Bates told the Daily Mail. “And they threw it out and ‘corrected’ it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.”

Bates, who could not be reached for comment, but has published some of his allegations in a blog, claims to have documentation of his explosive charges and indicated more revelations are coming.

A NOAA spokesman, in an email to The Washington Times, said NOAA “stands behind its world-class scientists” but also that it “takes seriously any allegation that its internal processes have not been followed and will review the matter appropriately.”

Bates is not the first to question Karl’s conclusions. A paper by Canadian climate modeler John Fyfe questioned the 2015 study. As he put it, in a 2016 article from the journal Nature Climate Change, “there is a mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what observations are showing. We can’t ignore it.”

Climate scientists have closed ranks around Karl. A study published last month in Science Advances, by Zeke Hausfather of University of California Berkeley and five others, claims to confirm Karl’s findings.

In addition, climate scientist Peter Thorne, who has worked with the NOAA, said Bates wasn’t involved in the work that he’s criticizing. Bates disputed the assertion.

While Karl, and other scientists who believe man-made climate change poses a major threat had the ear of the Obama administration, President Trump has shown signs of skepticism. It remains to be seen from which scientists he will take his cue.

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