Collapse of the Greenland glaciers

admin /24 December, 2009

Collapse of the Greenland Glaciers

Dr. John James.    www.planetextinction.com

The Greenland glaciers that cover the island contain enough water to raise sea level twenty feet, or seven meters. It was once thought (and that was only six years ago) that the glaciers would be self-sustaining even in a warming world because of size and so on.

We now know that not only are the edges melting fast, but the surface melt is seeping through the ice to lubricate the junction between the glacier and the rock underneath. This is the unexpected factor that has turned scientific attention onto this escalating problem.

It appears that the Greenland ice is shot through with crevices, tunnels and faults through which the melting upper surface can penetrate right through the glacier, and threaten to break the attachment between the ice and the rock base.

When this happens much of this mountain of water will flow into the sea. Already twenty-one of the great glacial masses are moving seawards eight times faster than ten years ago and disintegrating three times faster than in the preceding five years.

Refugees and War

admin /24 December, 2009

Refugees and War
 
Dr. John James. www.planetextinction.com

Modern civilization has never experienced weather conditions as persistently disruptive as those we should expect from here on. Nor have we yet faced the appalling consequences of a significant rise in sea-levels.

If the sea rises a modest 400mm 22% of coastal wetlands will be lost, and more when we include the likely human reaction to that change. It would impact on over 400,000 square Km of coast, especially in the deltas of Bangladesh, Vietnam and China, while the Kiribati, Fijian and Maldive islands would lose a large part of their most arable land.

The cost of dealing with such a rise was recently estimated to be £9 billion. Insurers have warned that the cost of just one major flood would be almost twice that, especially in the financial district of Central London. What then if the ice sheets of Greenland melted?

A one meter sea-level rise would affect 6 million people in Egypt, with some 15% of agricultural land lost, 13 million in Bangladesh with 16% of the national rice production lost, and 72 million in China with tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land. 

The Clathrate Smoking Gun

admin /24 December, 2009

The Clathrate Smoking Gun

John James          www.planetextinction.com

Huge quantities of methane are held in ice-like structures in the cold northern bogs and the bottom of the seas. They are called clathrates (or cathrates). They are stable only in the cold or under high pressure. Methane is 24 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

The estimated amount of methane stored in these clathrates is gargantuan. They are the largest concentration of methane found on earth.

The compression of methane gas in clathrates is enormous. One cubic meter of clathrates brought to the ocean’s surface releases 164 cubic meters of methane.