If we have beset the climate ahead for a thousand years with a forcing quantity of GHG's, the science now conducted may help us at least explain "what" we have done to change the future for our descendent's next 50 generations. We must be able to tell them what we did to end the existence of the magnificent Polar Bear. Or, what we did in these next few years to save him, and many, many others. These few years are the "last years" of many, many species on Earth. We hope too, that it is not our "last years." To assure that we have done right by our world and to it, we may have to exact reparation from those who have ignored the truth before them. We likely need to do this soon. It is very important that our legal systems ascribe to our Science, and that we assign responsibility for behaviors to penalties for those behaviors.

We are remarkable. We are remarkable beings. We caused much of what is happening to melt the ice at both the top and the bottom of the world.

At the top of this world, most of us are clustered with our CO2 producing and polluting social systems and governments -- governments themselves that are outgrowths of the alpha male tribal or band system that we have carried over the time since the last Ice Age termination -- some ~13,000 years ago.

These social grouping have served the species well to a point, but I think they, too, are on the edge of extinction.

There must be a better way for an almost bright primate to survive on this once fair world. Some think it is by "globalization" a term used mostly as a "code" for the economic exploitation of many populations on Earth, a means of eliminating the cultural aspects we have developed since the stone age deglaciation, and a means of a Wal Mart style market homogenization, turning all into an economically orchestrated venture with one purpose only (profit) at the expense of everything else.

This exploitation of people by making a pablum of things out of and from the environment is the wrong direction -- or at least the wrong goal. There are too many primates for the planet to handle without the primates damaging it.

(I am re-organizing it, but the end of this Manburger Box posting has a little of what I would prescribe and probably hate to see happen, though I could handle it.)

http://xomba.com/numbers_of_the_beast_the_manburger_box

Meanwhile read on about recent discoveries at the bottom of the Earth.

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SCIENCE . . .

Science is the Latin word for Knowledge.

When employed, it constrains the political. Or it should.

This little report on a major effort and new discoveries is but a piece of a larger conundrum. This report strings together some older research, and leads in the direction to this description of discovery. There are some significant other questions still unanswered. . .

For a related story, see this part with some about the British Antarctic Survey:

http://www.xomba.com/making_glaciers_move_beneath_the_antarctic_glaciers_streams_and_rivers

In the recent past, explorers sought the "Source of the Nile." Although the Nile is not the only major river on the African continent, on its banks one of the earliest advanced human civilizations sustained it self for thousands of years. At the time of European expansion and exploration, the changes of an intervening millennium had removed the knowledge of the Nile’s source from those left living in the ‘ruins’. One European goal was wealth and fame. Another goal was to define, understand and exploit what might be there for personal, corporate, governmental, or social benefit.

Depending on your perspective, the European based expansion and ‘conquest’ of the peoples and resources of the once “Mysterious African Continent” shaped much of the current post-colonial mishmash Africa is yet far from reconciling with itself.

From Africa, ,whence humanity arose, the place itself needs thoughtful re-visitation by its children now scattered across the Earth.

Yet there are still important mysteries and mysterious places left to explore and understand. One such is the “Last Continent,” the one hidden beneath the polar ice, at the bottom of the world.

More challenges than the hunt of the Nile’s source are before us on the Last Continent.

These modern day explorers are scientists searching and exploring Antarctica to exploit for our entire species, the potential certain knowledge of processes underway on the bottom of the planet which will affect the climate and sea level of the Earth.

A few of the processes occurring in Antarctica are old and cyclical processes; ones we humans would like to grasp out of a human curiosity. But there are processes occurring now that humans for the last few hundred years are likely to have stoked and fueled, and by our vast numbers, initiated. Processes that are now beginning to engender effects both inevitable and maybe more abrupt than anything we could have anticipated. And we must explore them

Many refer to that point once passed as a “Tipping Point.” Most of us do not want to accept it may even exist; and even fewer that they had any part in causing it. Many of us have denied the obvious facts for continued personal profit. These were denials that any changes outside of the normal course of events were occurring, and even when obvious, continued to violate species moral imperatives for their own benefit and profit. Such courses these few followed even at the risk of hurting millions and millions of other humans, were courses taken for a few dollars, and for power.

For our species, these kinds of behaviors among a few of our members, to the detriment of a great many, are behaviors that might well be excised in the coming re-adjustment of mankind to his environment. Species survival, for the benefit of the species will outweigh the need to keep for the future, those that do not contribute to the species survival.

Knowledge of processes in Antarctica, besides being scientifically satisfying, will perhaps allow our species more choices for our futures than ignorance of these processes would allow.

Images: USGS

Using RADARSAT SAR imagery obtained during the 1997 Antarctic Mapping Mission, ice velocity vectors were obtained over the East Antarctic Ice Streams (see figure above). The upstream velocity of the Recovery Glacier is about 100 meters/year (light blue areas). Near the grounding line there is a local peak velocity of about 900 meters/year (yellow and red areas).

Images: NSIDC

The images below were from 1996 work, and though closer to open ocean have sufficient lubricant to move the ice rapidly.

In an even earlier generation getting these measurements was life-threatening. Naval support helicopters ferried scientists to their work sites. Survival depended on the Navy to return for you, and you hoped the weather would hold.

Images: NSIDC

An enormous ice stream, reaching at least 800 km into East Antarctica, feeds Recovery Glacier. It too is fed by a funnel-shaped catchment. Down-glacier, crevasses cascade across the ice stream at several locations suggesting strong variations in basal topography modulates the flow. The confluence of a thin, elongated, 280 km-long tributary ice stream with Recovery Glacier is located approximately 250 km from the constriction where Recovery Glacier enters the Filchner Ice Shelf. The central body of the pipe-like tributary is crevasse free indicating that shear stresses are concentrated only at the margins. The tributary is an enigma in that there is little evidence for ice flow into the tributary from the adjacent ice sheet and there is little if any indication as to the source of ice from the up-glacier catchment region. A less active pipe-like tributary merges with Recovery Glacier just upstream of the grounding line. The uppermost portion of that 300 km long tributary is dark and featureless, similar to the eastern companion. Down-glacier, the tributary surface is similarly mottled to the adjacent ice sheet.

March 5, 2007---Update:

Antarctic Ice Sheet's Hidden Lakes Speed Ice Flow Into Ocean, May Disrupt Climate

A good deal of what is written below was contained in a NASA release, published on March 5, 2007, and modified, because I am writing about the reports, not writing them from my work.

I will use some of that release as a framework, but you will find this interesting if you are interested in the 7+ million cubic miles of ice on the ice-bound continent -- and the ominous possibility that we humans have, like many think, 'tipped' the balance and forced a future we can only anticipate with a sobering horror.

A PIECE OF ONE OF THE PUZZLES

A piece of one of the puzzles that needs answering has been found to involve lakes hidden deep beneath the ice and waterways and watercourses attending them. Many of these are barely detectable at the surface of the ice sheet.

In a new study, researchers have "lifted the cover" on understanding how water present or moving within this vast subglacial system contributes to the formation of ice streams, and how these play a crucial role in transporting ice from the remote interior of Antarctica toward the surrounding ocean.

Water flowing from this network of under-ice lakes, they say, ultimately affects climate and global sea level. Below is new information pertinent to the Filchner-Ronne Ice Sheet area. All of us are interested in the potential melting and movement of the water NOT tied into the ice in Antarctica. All of these reports enhance our understanding of the potential ahead as the climate changes.

A research team, led by geophysicists Robin Bell and Michael Studinger from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York City, discovered four large, subglacial lakes miles beneath the Antarctic ice sheet's surface.

Image below: NASA Combined RADARSAT and ICESat images show the Recovery Glacier Ice Stream (arrows) and location of four new subglacial lakes (A, B, C and D) that lie at the head of the stream. The image below, from the 1996-1997 work was copied here to show how the progress is made a cold Antarctic summer at a time. Note the areas of coincidence. Most of this discovery you helped finance through funding for the National Science Foundation.

Image: NSIDC
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The team was able to link these lakes for the first time to a fast flowing ice stream and establish that within this 170-mile wide area the lakes contribute to the creation of a major ice stream. The team includes scientists from NASA, the University of New Hampshire, Durham, and the University of Washington, Seattle. Their results were published in the 2007 Feb. 22 issue of Nature.

Earlier work, lower in elevation and closer to the glaciers’ final outlet in the Weddell Sea, is directly related to these “upstream” findings and adds to the over all understanding of how the water and ice from the Antarctic interior is transported.

"This connection of major subglacial lakes to the accelerated pace of ice movement deep in Antarctica’s interior is a key piece of the ice sheet stability puzzle," said co-author Christopher Shuman, a physical scientist in the Cryospheric Science Branch at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "Given the remoteness of the area, we could not have put the picture together without multiple types of satellite data."

Ice streams are large, fast-flowing features within ice sheets that transport land-based ice and meltwater to the ocean. One such stream, the Recovery Glacier ice stream, annually drains the equivalent of eight percent of the huge East Antarctic Ice Sheet, an area larger than the continental United States. The associated Recovery drainage basin, virtually unexplored since an American-led Antarctic ice sheet research trek over 40 years ago, funnels an estimated 35 billion tons of ice into the Weddell Sea annually, an amount in water equivalent to nearly 780,000 acre feet.

The question also becomes how much water and ice is coming from the rest of the continent, and making its way under, in or atop the vast area of ice which is Antarctica?

Remote sensing technology called interferometric synthetic aperture radar from the Canadian Space Agency, RADARSAT measured the speed of the ice flow. Also used was visible light imagery from sensors aboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites.

NASA's Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite high-resolution laser data revealed the small changes in the ice sheet landscape characteristics of the ice stream thereby indicating the presence of subglacial lakes.

The team discovered that the lakes absolutely coincide with the origin of tributaries of the Recovery Glacier ice stream.

Upstream of the lakes, the ice sheet moves at just a few feet a year; downstream the flow increases to a third of a mile (1740+ feet) each year. The research team concludes the lakes provide the reservoir of water that lubricates the bed of the stream, which speeds the flow of ice, and prevents the base of the sheet from freezing to the bedrock.

The scientists used a remote sensing technology called interferometric synthetic aperture radar from the Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT instrument to measure the speed of the ice flow. They also used visible imagery from sensors aboard NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites and high-resolution laser data from NASA's Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite to capture small changes in the landscape characteristics of the ice stream indicating the presence of subglacial lakes
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IMAGES: Wikipedia
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Vostok Lake was a radar discovery of Russian and British scientists. The lake's existence became known in 1996 by integrating and understanding a variety of data, including airborne ice-penetrating radar imaging observations and space borne radar altimetry.

It has since been confirmed that the lake contains plenty of liquid water under the more than three-kilometer thick icecap, promising to be the most "unspoiled" lake on Earth.

Its water is thought to be very old, with a mean residence time in the order of one million years (as compared with six years for Lake Ontario, which is typical for lakes of that size). Further study and exploration will be needed to determine the age case.

Image: www.aari.aq

Researchers working at Vostok Station produced one of the world's longest ice cores in 1998. A joint Russian, French, and U.S. team drilled and analyzed the core, which is 3623 m (11,886 feet) long. Ice samples from cores drilled close to the top of the lake have been analyzed to be as old as 420,000 years, suggesting that the lake has been sealed under the icecap for between 500,000 and more than a million years.

Drilling of the core was deliberately halted roughly 120 m (400 feet) above the suspected boundary where the ice sheet and the liquid waters of the lake are thought to meet to prevent contamination of the lake from the 60 ton column of freon and aviation fuel the Russians filled it with to prevent it freezing over.

From this core, specifically from ice that is thought to have formed from lake water freezing onto the base of the ice sheet, evidence has been found, in the form of microbes, to suggest that the lake water supports life. Scientists suggested that the lake could possess a unique habitat for ancient bacteria with an isolated microbial gene pool containing characteristics developed perhaps 500,000 years ago.

In January 2006, Robin Bell and Michael Studinger, Geophysical researchers from Columbia University, announced in Geophysical Research Letters the discovery of two smaller lakes under the icecap, named 90 Degrees East and Sovetskaya.
It is also suspected that the Antarctic subglacial lakes may be connected by a network of subterranean rivers. Glaciologist's Duncan Wingham (University College, London) and Martin Siegert (University of Bristol, now University of Edinburgh) published in Nature in 2006 that many of the subglacial lakes of Antarctica are at least temporarily interconnected. Obviously because of varying water pressure in individual lakes, large, sub-surface rivers may suddenly form and then force large amounts of water through the solid ice.
To probe the waters of Lake Vostok for life without contamination, plans were initiated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to start with a melter probe- the so-called "cryobot" - which melts down through the ice over Lake Vostok, trailing and unwinding a communications and power cable as it goes. The cryobot carries with it a small submersible, called a "hydrobot", which is deployed when the cryobot has melted to the ice-water interface. The hydrobot then swims off and "looks for life" with a camera and other instruments.

Image: Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Discovered by Soviet and Russian scientists, Lake Vostok lies in the heart of the Antarctic continent hidden beneath miles of ice. As big as Lake Ontario in North America, Lake Vostok is one of the world's biggest freshwater lakes. Lake Vostok has been covered by the vast Antarctic ice sheet for up to 25 million years.

"It's almost as if the lakes are capturing the geothermal energy from the entire basin and releasing it to the ice stream," said lead author Bell, a senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "They power the engines that drive ice sheet collapse. The more we learn about the lakes, the more we realize how important they are to ice sheet stability."

The team's work also suggests that subglacial lakes play a role in sea-level rise as well as regional and global climate change. "Here we found that meltwater at the base of the ice sheet speeds the flow of Recovery ice to the oceans. In turn, that contributes to higher sea levels worldwide," said Shuman. "Floods have been known to originate from the interior of the ice sheet in the past, possibly from systems like these subglacial lakes. These sudden outbursts of fresh water could potentially interfere with nearby ocean currents that redistribute heat around the globe and could disrupt the Earth's climate system."
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http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpeg/65627main_a002062.mpeg
IMAGES: NASA

Above satellite image from NASA's MODIS sensor aboard the Terra spacecraft shows the Larsen B Ice Shelf region on 1 November 2003. Red dots indicate sites where ice flow speed was measured using more detailed Landsat 7 images. The colored lines track the retreat of the Larsen B Ice Shelf during the past 6 years, and the black line shows the coastline, or "grounding line," where the thick ice begins to float off the sea floor. Blue lines on the glaciers show the location of laser elevation profiles from ICESat. A weather station location marked in the upper right of the image map ("Matienzo AWS") has tracked atmospheric warming in summers over the past 30+ years in the region. CREDIT National Snow And Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

FIRE AND ICE - - AN ENIGMATIC INTERPLAY

IMAGE: NASA
Cold, snowy, and stuck at the bottom of the Earth, Antarctica might seem like a dull place. But this big continent can produce a surprisingly dynamic range of conditions. One example of this range is temperature trends. Although Antarctica warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole.

This image shows trends in "skin" temperatures -- temperatures from roughly the top millimeter of the land or sea surface not air temperatures. The data were collected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensors that were flown on several National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. The data come from the AVHRR's thermal infrared channel a portion of the light spectrum we can sense as heat but that human eyes cannot see. This image shows temperature trends for the icy continent from 1982 to 2004. Red indicates areas where temperatures generally increased during that period, and blue shows where temperatures predominantly decreased.

The area of strongest cooling appears at the South Pole, and the region of strongest warming lies along the Antarctic Peninsula. In some instances, bright red spots or streaks along the edge of the continent show where icebergs calved or ice shelves disintegrated, meaning the satellite began seeing warmer ocean water where there had previously been ice. One example of this is the bright red line along the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Why is Antarctica getting colder in the middle when it's warming up around the edge? One possible explanation is that the warmer temperatures in the surrounding ocean have produced more precipitation in the continents interior, and this increased snowfall has cooled the high-altitude region around the pole. Another possible explanation involves ozone. Ozone in the Earth's stratosphere absorbs ultraviolet radiation, and absorbing this energy warms the stratosphere. Loss of UV-absorbing ozone may have cooled the stratosphere and strengthened the polar vortex, a pattern of spinning winds around the South Pole. The vortex acts like an atmospheric barrier, preventing warmer, coastal air from moving in to the continent's interior. A stronger polar vortex might explain the cooling trend in the interior of Antarctica.

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http://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov/publications/pdf/pubs2002/2_on_thin_ice.pdf
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There is much to learn.

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