......some parts of the continent are gaining ice depth through snowfall while;
......temperatures on the continent's closest point to South America, are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet.
The surprisingly fast-moving glaciers are largely on the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Each year the ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica amounts to about 10 percent of the rise in the global sea level, which totals about one-tenth of an inch per year. The net loss of Antarctic ice is estimated to be 25 billion metric tons a year, despite the growth of the ice sheet in East Antarctica.
In Greenland, glaciers appear to be moving more quickly to sea because melting ice has allowed the sheet to slide more easily over the rock and dirt below.
......In Antarctica, the loss is believed to be associated with the breaking off into seawater of ice deep under the ice sheet with little-understood internal dynamics that put increased pressure on the massive ice streams.
SOURCE:..... Antarctic Glaciers' Sloughing of Ice Has Scientists at a Loss
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Rethinking Ice Sheet Time Scales
Science 16 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1508 - 1510
Today, we can monitor ice sheets with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. The resulting news has consistently had an element of surprise with regard to time scales. Invariably, processes are happening more rapidly than previously thought possible.
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FROM 2006:
Siberian Heatwave - & - NOAA's Arctic Report
........in northern Siberia. Ice packs are failing to form, forcing polar bears, seals and walruses to remain on land, disrupting breeding cycles.
.......Jacqueline A. Richter-Menge of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., said the sea ice decline is now being observed in both winter and summer.
The State of Our Climate - An Alarming Synthesis of Articles
......The authors divided the last four years into 2002-04 and 2004-06. In that time, the rate of melt (in cubic km) has increased 2.5X for the whole of Greenland, but increased 12X for the southern part.
..... “a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.”
[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on March 19, 2007]
Note: Antarctic Glaciers' Sl...
Rethinking Ice Sheet Ti...
Siberian Heatwave - &a...
The State of Our Clima...
Stumble It!
-Max Planck<br />
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"And God said: 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan."
* George Bu
An interesting point - but not as far as I know.
It would be also be interesting to see if abyssal (at the bottom of the deep ocean) volcanic activity has increased significantly.
Looking through the Kola deep-drill information, what I have seen is that geologic processes are "poorly understood"
(ie: much of what was predicted was dead wrong)
<a href="http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050308_super_volcano.html">http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050308_super_volcano.html</a><p>---<br>"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." <br />
-Max Planck<br />
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“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous, the essential act of warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour”