Ice island breaks off Arctic shelf
Guardian Unlimited Environment
An ice island the size of a small city is adrift in the Arctic after breaking free from one of Canada’s largest ice shelves, scientists said today.The ice island is 37 metres (120ft) thick and measures 9 miles by 3 miles, according to the CanWest News Service. It broke clear from Ellesmere island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole, 16 months ago, triggering tremors so powerful they were picked up by earthquake monitors 155 miles away.
More precisely, it triggered tremors that were so weak they were not noticed until someone went back and tried to figure out exactly when this event happened.
The island was part of the Ayles ice shelf, one of six major ice shelves in Canada’s Arctic. Scientists believe the shelf’s break-up - the largest of its kind in the Canadian Artic in 30 years - is the result of global warming.
Out of curiousity, what was the larger breakup 30 years caused by? Was that global warming as well?
I’ll freely admit that this ice breakup is consistant with some global warming predictions and anthropromorthic global warming is a logical enough theory that along with recent warming trends we seem to be detecting it is worth serious consideration and study.
That said, I am skeptical about the scientific process that surrounds this debate and concerned that political motivations, rather than good science, is driving it. Beyond that, the reporting that translates the science into the public consciousness is deeply flawed.
I agree - the reporting of this event was fairly poor. Descriptions like “11,000 football fields” don’t really provide any relative size. On top of that, it wasn’t clear the event actually happened almost 2 years ago.
That said, just because the reporting is poor and that there are political people talking about the problem doesn’t make the problem any less severe. The good news is that I think 2006 has become _the_ year that we’ll look back and remember as the year that climate control became a real issue that everyone was concerned about, so I guess that’s a good thing.