The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode, a new study found….

Using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That’s where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the study….

“To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?” said lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s more widespread than we previously thought.”

That’s from “Study: ‘Runaway’ melt on Antarctica, Greenland,” the pull-no-punches MSNBC story last month.  The full study, “Extensive dynamic thinning on the margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” was published in Nature (subs. req’d, excerpted below).

The British Antarctic Survey put out a news release with graphics.  Here are some satellite tracks, from NASA’s ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite), revealing areas of dynamic thinning (red) in Antarctica and Greenland [click to enlarge].

The release notes that this “dynamic thinning”:

The authors conclude “Ice shelf collapse has triggered particularly strong thinning that has endured for decades.”  More of the MSNBC story:

Some of those areas are about a mile thick, so they’ve still got plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 is 50 percent higher than it was from 1995 to 2003.

These new measurements confirm what some of the more pessimistic scientists thought: The melting along the crucial edges of the two major ice sheets is accelerating and is in a self-feeding loop. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.

What’s going on in Antarctica may be even more worrisome than what’s happening in Greenland, as I’ve noted (see Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier” and “Q: How much can West Antarctica plausibly contribute to sea level rise by 2100?” [A:  3 to 5 feet]).

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined.  In 2001, the IPCC “consensus” said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.  As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

The warming of the WAIS is most worrisome (at least for this century) because it’s going to disintegrate long before the East Antarctic Ice Sheet does — since WAIS appears to be melting from underneath (i.e. the water is warming, too), and since, as I wrote in the “high water” part of my book, the WAIS is inherently less stable:

Perhaps the most important, and worrisome, fact about the WAIS is that it is fundamentally far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. The WAIS rests on bedrock as deep as two kilometers underwater. One 2004 NASA-led study found that most of the glaciers they were studying “flow into floating ice shelves over bedrock up to hundreds of meters deeper than previous estimates, providing exit routes for ice from further inland if ice-sheet collapse is under way.” A 2002 study in Science examined the underwater grounding lines–the points where the ice starts floating. Using satellites, the researchers determined that “bottom melt rates experienced by large outlet glaciers near their grounding lines are far higher than generally assumed.” And that melt rate is positively correlated with ocean temperature.

The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS outlet glaciers will become. Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle. The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS (see, for instance, here).

You can read every thing a laymen could possibly want to know about what the recent study on Antarctic warming does and doesn’t show at RealClimate here.

The authors of the Nature article find:

In Antarctica, we find significant dynamic thinning of fast-flowing ice at rates greater than plausible through interannual accumulation variability for drainage sectors….  On the glacier scale, thinning is strongest in the Amundsen Sea embayment (ASE), where it is confirmed as being localized on the fast-flowing glaciers and their tributaries (Fig. 3 [below]. The area close to the Pine Island Glacier grounding line thinned in the period 2003–2007 at up to 6 m yr-1, neighbouring Smith Glacier thinned at a rate in excess of 9 m yr-1 and Thwaites Glacier thinned at a rate of around 4 m yr-1. These rates are higher than those reported for the 2002–2004 period.

They conclude:

In Antarctica, dynamic thinning has accelerated at the grounding lines of the major glaciers of the Amundsen Sea embayment, and in places has penetrated to within 100 km of the ice divides. Ice-shelf-collapse glaciers show particularly strong thinning that has persisted for years to decades after collapse and in places has penetrated to their headwalls. Although losses are partly offset by strong gains on the spine and western flank of the Antarctic Peninsula, numerous glaciers feeding intact Antarctic Peninsula, West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice shelves are also thinning dynamically. We infer that grounded glaciers and ice streams are responding sensitively not only to ice-shelf collapse but to shelf thinning owing to ocean-driven melting. This is an apparently widespread phenomenon that does not require climate warming sufficient to initiate ice-shelf surface melt. Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized.

Did I mention the time to act is now!

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Uber-ironic 1962 ad touts oil’s ability to melt glaciers!

Antarctica is warming rapidly, climate scientists report, upsetting fragile ecosystems and threatening the world with a significant rise in sea-levels. With the largely uninhabited and frozen continent melting before humanity's very eyes, what better time to roll out a new documentary about the coldest, driest and windiest place on Earth.

Billed as a journey to Antarctica for scientific discovery, "Ice People," a documentary set to air tonight on the Sundance Channel, is really more of an exercise in landscape cinematography.

Two-thirds of the 77-minute film is devoted to capturing some breathtaking panoramas, which was no easy feat. Filmmaker Anne Aghion shot in -60 degree F temperatures to capture some rarely seen images of Antarctica and the people who live and work there. At one point Aghion braved 95-mph winds to document the repair of a windmill on the Ross Sea Archipelago. (They use wind power in Antarctica! -- who knew?)

But the result of a film heavy on snow-covered mountains and wind-blown ice and snow is that "Ice People" comes devoid of plot. Lacking a narrator, what descriptive information a viewer gets is from the handful of interviews with the four research scientists who are the principal subjects of the film, and a single scene devoted to documenting operations at McMurdo Station, the largest bastion of humanity on the continent.

When it's not ogling the landscape, the film followed two field geologists, Drs. Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis, and two undergraduate students, Kelly Gorz and Andrew Podoll, looking for evidence of a warmer past in ancient Antarctic lakebeds. During the course of the filming, the researchers made a breakthrough discovery of exquisitely preserved moss and leaf fossils, as well as a layer of volcanic ash that allowed the scientists to date the abrupt collapse of a warm Antarctic climate to about 14 million years ago. The discovery of Antarctica's warm past made headlines around the world last year, but you wouldn't know that from the film, which glossed over mention of the discovery to make time for more footage of the scientists digging holes in a field of boulders.

In the final 15 minutes, film's focus shifts dramatically from the Antarctic landscape to the lives of the research scientists. Here, at last, are some one-on-one interviews with the four scientists as well as scenes of their austere living conditions camped out on a frozen lakebed and debating subjects such as the intersection of religion and science (not much intersection, they agreed) and how it feels not to shower for four months (gross).

As awe-inspiring as the cinematography was, had I not been watching "Ice People" for a review, I probably would have given up after the first 20 minutes. The novelty of footage from the exotic Antarctic landscape wore off well before the much more compelling stories of the research scientists ever began to take shape.

But for anyone looking to gaze on one of the last untouched wildernesses on the planet, the footage Aghion recorded is hard to beat.

"Ice People" airs on the Sundance Channel Tuesday night at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT.

Watch the trailer:

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Uber-ironic 1962 ad touts oil’s ability to melt glaciers!

The old codger has been haunting my Sunday evenings for more than three decades. When I was a kid, "60 Minutes" opinionator Andy Rooney was kinda entertaining; his "common sense" rants about the stupidity of daily life appealed to my pre-pubescent world view.

And as I got older, it was still fun to watch the old guy rant about whatever had pissed him off the past week. But at a certain point, like after watching his routine for 20 years, it got annoying. Then, after another 10 years, it became sad. One man dedicates his entire life to cranky diatribes. Can you spell R-E-T-I-R-E?!

Then, when you think there's no end to the train wreck, Rooney surprises you like he did last night. Rooney, the man who probably still rues the day Marconi invented radio technology, says he's worried about global warming. Take a watch:

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Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet”

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‘Ice People’ is packed with plenty of ice, not so many people

A few (green) minutes with Andy Rooney…

U.K. Telegraph: “Antarctic ice bridge collapse hailed as new sign of global warming.”

A. 3 to 5 feet — contributing to an increasingly likely total sea-level rise of more than 5 feet by 2100, a rise that will be all but impossible to stop if we don’t sharply reverse CO2 emissions trends within a decade or so.

West Antarctica’s collapsing ice shelves are in the news today.  This post will survey what we now know about this unstable ice sheet and the threat it poses to humanity — or is that the threat humanity poses to it? — if we continue on our current suicidal emissions path.

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined.  In 2001, the IPCC “consensus” said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.  As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

A 2007 study found “The current loss of mass from the Amundsen Sea embayment of the West Antarctic ice sheet [WAIS] is equivalent to that from the entire Greenland ice sheet” (see the new survey report Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment draft here).  And WAIS’s 2007’s ice loss was 75% higher than 2006’s (see “The Antarctic ice sheet hits the fan“).

On Saturday, Reuters reported on a major new study on Antarctic ice shelves, “Coastal-Change and Glaciological Map of the Larsen Ice Shelf Area, Antarctica: 1940–2005“:

One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday.

They said the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.

Climate change is to blame, according to the report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey, available at pubs.usgs.gov/imap/2600/B.

“The rapid retreat of glaciers there demonstrates once again the profound effects our planet is already experiencing — more rapidly than previously known — as a consequence of climate change,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.

“This continued and often significant glacier retreat is a wakeup call that change is happening … and we need to be prepared,” USGS glaciologist Jane Ferrigno, who led the Antarctica study, said in a statement.

“Antarctica is of special interest because it holds an estimated 91 percent of the Earth’s glacier volume, and change anywhere in the ice sheet poses significant hazards to society,” she said.

In a remarkable example of the accelerating nature of human-caused climate change, the UK Telegraph reports today:

Satellite images have revealed that a 25 mile long strip of ice, which is believed to have pinned the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place since the beginning of recorded history, had broken at its narrowest point.

Without it, ice will be able to flow more freely between Charcot and Latady islands on the western side of the Antarctic, eventually moving into the open seas.

The Wilkins, the size of Jamaica or half the size of Scotland, is the largest of 10 shelves to have shrunk or collapsed in recent years on the Antarctic Peninsula amid rising temperatures in the region.

You can see a video of the demise here.

The ice shelf has lost a total of 694 square miles – or some 14 per cent of its size – over the past year, which shrank the ice bridge to under 546 yards as its narrowest point….

Ice shelves, some of them hundreds of miles thick [wide], float on the water and contract as they melt, so breakages will not directly raise sea levels.

However, research has shown that when ice shelves are removed, the glaciers and landed ice behind them start to move towards the ocean more rapidly, which will add to the amount of water in the seas.

Antarctic temperatures have risen by up to about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) in the past 50 years, the fastest increase in the southern hemisphere [see "Antarctica has warmed significantly over past 50 years, revisited"].

It is really the warming of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) that you should worry about (at least for this century) because it’s going to disintegrate long before the East Antarctic Ice Sheet does — since WAIS appears to be melting from underneath (i.e. the water is warming, too), and since, as I wrote in the “high water” part of my book, the WAIS is inherently less stable:

Perhaps the most important, and worrisome, fact about the WAIS is that it is fundamentally far less stable than the Greenland ice sheet because most of it is grounded far below sea level. The WAIS rests on bedrock as deep as two kilometers underwater. One 2004 NASA-led study found that most of the glaciers they were studying “flow into floating ice shelves over bedrock up to hundreds of meters deeper than previous estimates, providing exit routes for ice from further inland if ice-sheet collapse is under way.” A 2002 study in Science examined the underwater grounding lines–the points where the ice starts floating. Using satellites, the researchers determined that “bottom melt rates experienced by large outlet glaciers near their grounding lines are far higher than generally assumed.” And that melt rate is positively correlated with ocean temperature.

The warmer it gets, the more unstable WAIS outlet glaciers will become. Since so much of the ice sheet is grounded underwater, rising sea levels may have the effect of lifting the sheets, allowing more-and increasingly warmer-water underneath it, leading to further bottom melting, more ice shelf disintegration, accelerated glacial flow, and further sea level rise, and so on and on, another vicious cycle. The combination of global warming and accelerating sea level rise from Greenland could be the trigger for catastrophic collapse in the WAIS (see, for instance, here).

You can read every thing a laymen could possibly want to know about what the recent study on Antarctic warming does and doesn’t show at RealClimate here. Andy Revkin blogs on the NYT coverage of the study with expert commentary here.

Now a couple of new papers published by Nature in March have been portrayed as suggesting the WAIS as a whole may be stabler than was previously thought.  Yet the first paper, “Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations” (subs. req’), concludes:

Our data provide direct evidence for orbitally induced oscillations in the WAIS, which periodically collapsed, resulting in a switch from grounded ice, or ice shelves, to open waters in the Ross embayment when planetary temperatures were up to 3 °C warmer than today and atmospheric CO2 concentration was as high as 400 p.p.m.v.

We’ll be at 400 ppm by 2020.  We’re on track to be more than 5°C warmer by 2100.  So the first paper doesn’t seem terribly reassuring.

The second paper by Pollard and DeConto (the one that got all the attention), “Modelling West Antarctic ice sheet growth and collapse through the past five million years,” (subs. req’), notes, “Recent melt rates under small Antarctic ice shelves are inferred to be increasing dramatically” and concluded:

… the WAIS will begin to collapse when nearby ocean temperatures warm by roughly 5 °C. Global climate and regional ocean modelling is needed to predict when and if future ocean temperatures and melt rates under the major Antarctic ice shelves will increase by these amounts, and if so, for how long.

Are you reassured yet?

I would note that West Antarctica land temperatures have risen up to 3°C over the past 50 years — some 4 times what the planet as a whole has warmed. And both Hadley and MIT say the planet will warm more than 5°C by 2100, with a 10% chance of warming more than 7°C (see M.I.T. doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C and “Hadley Center warns of “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path.  And while the ocean warms less than the nearby land, the new study Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment warns: “UP TO one-third of all Antarctic sea ice is likely to melt by the end of the century.”  So we may yet see polar amplifacation near the South Pole (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).

Dr. Robert Bindschadler of NASA, who has been an active Antarctic field researcher for the past 25 years, commented on the new study (here):

I’m familiar with the Pollard/DeConto work. They previewed it last fall at an annual science workshop I organize on West Antarctic research. Their model lacks the detail to get the fastest dynamic responses, so the 0.5m/century rate for sea level rise should only be viewed as a lower bound (and a poor one, at that).

Their model is better at getting the longer-term quasi-equilibrium response (it just takes their model a little longer to get there), so it ’s very interesting that they demonstrate the sensitivity to the ocean temperature. That thinking is certainly where Antarctic scientists are being led by both data and models.

Moreover, the entire WAIS need not collapse for it to contribute to catastrophic sea level rise this century.

The Antarctic Peninsula alone contains “a total volume of 95,200 km3 (equivalent to 242 mm of sea-level; Pritchard and Vaughan, 2007), roughly half that of all glaciers and ice caps outside of either Greenland or Antarctica” (see Chapter 5 here)  — that would be more than 9 inches of sea level rise from a region of WAIS losing its protective ice shelves on both sides at an alarming pace.

But it is westernmost part of WAIS, that borders on the Amundsen Sea, that may be the most worrisome, as AP reported this year:

Glaciers in Antarctica are melting faster and across a much wider area than previously thought, a development that threatens to raise sea levels worldwide and force millions of people to flee low-lying areas, scientists said Wednesday.

Researchers once believed that the melting was limited to the Antarctic Peninsula, a narrow tongue of land pointing toward South America. But satellite data and automated weather stations now indicate it is more widespread.

The melting “also extends all the way down to what is called west Antarctica,” said Colin Summerhayes, executive director of the Britain-based Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

“That’s unusual and unexpected,” he told the Associated Press in an interview.

By the end of the century, the accelerated melting could cause sea levels to climb by 3 to 5 feet — levels substantially higher than predicted by a major scientific group just two years ago.

Making matters worse, scientists said, the ice shelves that hold the glaciers back from the sea are also weakening.

The report Wednesday from Geneva was a broad summary of two years of research by scientists from 60 countries. Some of the findings were released in earlier reports….

The biggest of the western glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, is moving 40% faster than it was in the 1970s, discharging water and ice more rapidly into the ocean, said Summerhayes, a member of International Polar Year’s steering committee.

The Smith Glacier, also in west Antarctica, is moving 83% faster than in 1992, he said.

The glaciers are slipping into the sea faster because the floating ice shelf that would normally stop them — usually 650 to 980 feet thick — is melting. And the glaciers’ discharge is making a significant contribution to increasing sea levels.

So we have the serious potential for 3 to 5 feet of sea-level rise just from WAIS this century — and that is on top of whatever we get from thermal expansion of the ocean and Greenland.  And on top of whatever we get from the melting of the inland glaciers, whose contribution was recently increased:

New research published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that melting glaciers will add at least 7 inches to the world’s sea level — and that’s if carbon dioxide pollution is quickly capped and then reduced.

Far more likely is an increase of at least 15 inches and probably more just from melting glaciers, the journal said.

So it increasingly looks like we are facing a very serious risk of more than 5 feet of total sea-level rise by 2100 on our current emissions path.

But this is almost not news anymore — see Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100. Indeed, an important Science article from 2007 used empirical data from last century to project that sea levels could be up to 5 feet higher in 2100 and rising 6 inches a decade (see Inundated with Information on Sea Level Rise.  Another 2007 study from Nature Geoscience came to the same conclusion (see “Sea levels may rise 5 feet by 2100“). Leading experts in the field have a similar view (see “Amazing AP article on sea level rise” and “Report from AGU meeting: One meter sea level rise by 2100 “very likely” even if warming stops?“).  Even a major report signed off on by the Bush administration itself was forced to concede that the IPCC numbers are simply too out of date to be quoted anymore (see US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections).

Did I mention the time to act is now!

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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COPENHAGEN—Months before make-or-break climate negotiations, a conclave of scientists warned Tuesday that the impact of global warming was accelerating beyond a forecast made by U.N. experts two years ago.

Sea levels this century may rise several times higher than predictions made in 2007 that form the scientific foundation for policymakers today, the meeting heard.

In March 2007, the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global warming, if unchecked, would lead to a devastating amalgam of floods, drought, disease and extreme weather by the century end.

The world’s oceans would creep up 18 to 59 centimeters (7 to 23 inches), enough to wipe out several small island nations and wreak havoc for tens of millions living in low-lying deltas in east Asia, the Indian subcontinent and Africa.

But a new study, presented at the Copenhagen meeting on Tuesday, factored in likely water runoff from disintegrating glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, and found the rise could be much higher.

The IPCC estimate had been based largely on the expansion of oceans from higher temperatures, rather than meltwater and the impact of glaciers tumbling into the sea.

Using the new model, “we get a range of sea level rise by 2100 between 75 and 190 centimeters when we apply the IPCC’s temperature scenarios for the future,” said climate expert Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Even if the world manages to dramatically cut the emission of greenhouse gases driving global warming, the “best estimate” is about one meter (3.25 feet), he said.

“A few years ago, those of us who talked about the impact of the ice sheets were seen as extremists. Today it is recognized as the central issue,” said glaciologist Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine.

“The world has very little time,” IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri told the meeting after the new findings were presented.

Participants also spoke out about fears that greenhouse gases—mainly emissions from oil, gas and coal—could trigger tipping points that would be nearly impossible to reverse.

The shrinking of the Arctic ice cap, and the release of billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases trapped in melting permafrost are two such “positive feedbacks” that could become both cause and consequence of global warming.

“We need to look at what is a ‘reasonable worst case’ in the lifetime of people alive today,” said John Ashton, Britain’s top climate negotiator, noting even rich nations had yet to take such scenarios seriously.

“A sea level rise of one or two meters would not just be damaging for China, it would be an absolute catastrophe. And what is catastrophic for China is catastrophic for the world,” he said.

More than 2,000 researchers from 80 countries responded to the open invitation to present their findings, which were then vetted by a panel of climate experts, many of them top figures in the IPCC.

“I and a lot of scientists see this meeting as an opportunity to update the science that has come out since the last IPCC report,” said William Howard, a researcher from the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia.

“The huge response from scientists comes from a sense of urgency, but also a sense of frustration,” said Katherine Richardson, head of the Danish government’s Commission on Climate Change Policy.

“Most of us have been trained as scientists to not get our hands dirty by talking to politicians. But we now realize that what we are dealing with is so complicated and urgent that we have to help to make sure the results are understood,” she told AFP.

Richardson said the 2007 IPCC report, called the Fourth Assessment Report, was an invaluable document but it would be years out of date when negotiators convene in Copenhagen in December to hammer out a global climate treaty.

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GENEVA—Icecaps around the North and South Poles are melting faster and in a more widespread manner than expected, raising sea levels and fuelling climate change, a major scientific survey showed Wednesday.

The International Polar Year survey found that warming in the Antarctic is “much more widespread than was thought,” while Arctic sea ice is diminishing and the melting of Greenland’s ice cover is accelerating.

Rising sea levels and changes in ocean temperatures triggered by the melting ice also heralded shifts in weather patterns worldwide and potentially more coastal storm surges, scientists said.

“We’re beginning to get hints of change in ocean circulation, that’ll have a dramatic impact on the global climate system,” IPY director David Carlson told journalists.

The frozen and often inaccessible polar regions have long been regarded as some of the most sensitive barometers of environmental change and global warming because of their influence on the world’s oceans and atmosphere.

Preliminary findings from the two year survey by thousands of scientists revealed new evidence that the ocean around the Antarctic has warmed more rapidly than the global average, the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science said in a statement.

Meanwhile, shifts in temperature patterns deep underwater indicated that the continent’s land ice sheet is melting faster than reckoned.

“These changes are signs that global warming is affecting the Antarctic in ways not previously suspected,” the statement added.

“These assessments continue to be refined, but it now appears that both the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass and thus raising sea level, and that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is growing.”

Shrinking sea ice was expected around Antarctica, while Arctic sea ice decreased to its lowest level since satellite records began.

Special IPY expeditions in the Arctic in 2007 and 2008 also found an “unprecedented rate” of floating drift ice.

But the focus was on the erosion of land-based ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic, which hold the bulk of the world’s freshwater reserves and can generate sea level changes of global scale as they melt.

“That was an urgent question three years ago and I think today it’s now a more urgent question,” Carlson said.

When the survey began in 2007, Greenland and Antarctica’s land areas were viewed as largely stable despite some worrying signs of fringe melting.

The joint statement concluded: “The message of IPY is loud and clear: what happens in the polar regions affects the rest of the world and concerns us all.”

The survey also revealed that the melting has the potential to feed more global warming in turn as the permafrost melts faster.

Permafrost, the expanse of continuously frozen soil in polar land areas, was found to have larger pools of carbon than expected and the melting could unleash more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The scientists also found that global warming caused substantial changes that were tantamount to a greening of the Arctic landscape.

Vegetation and soil were changing in the region, with shrubbery taking over grassland and tree growth shifting according to changing snowfall, while insect infestation increased and species move from lower latitudes into polar regions.

Those shifts also disrupted native animals, hunting and local livelihoods, while building was taking place in previously uninhabited areas, the scientists found.

The survey around both poles was the first of its kind for half a century, revisiting areas that have not been seen since the 1950s and mobilizing 10,000 scientists around the world.

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The warming Antarctic is changing life on the seafloor as well as above as icebergs freed from surrounding sea ice earlier than in previous years can pummel bottom-dwelling creatures for much of the year, according to a new study. "Our results suggest that as the winter sea-ice season shortens, the thousands of icebergs that float around the coastline of the Antarctic Peninsula will be free to move around and collide with the seabed creatures with ever increasing frequency," said lead author Daniel Smale of the British Antarctic Survey. The pummeling can completely reorganize life on the ocean floor where about 80 percent of Antarctic critters live. A large increase in berg scraping could potentially affect the distribution of key species and also the type and number of critters living on the seafloor. However, life does eventually return to the berg-raked areas. "Think of it like a forest," said David Barnes of BAS. "The weedy species that are normally crowded out and out-competed by the dominant species persist where big trees fall and create a clearing."

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Adélie penguins in the Antarctic are as chock-full of pesticide DDT as they were in the 1970s, even though global DDT use has dropped 80 percent in the past three decades, says new research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. Researchers speculate that climate change is at fault -- honestly, is there anything climate change is not mucking up? -- as concentrations of the pesticide that had been trapped in ice are released by glacial melt and travel up the food chain. DDT has been banned in the northern hemisphere, but the World Health Organization has endorsed its controlled use to fight malaria in Africa. The purpose of the study "was not to further vilify DDT," says lead author Heidi Geisz, but to research how persistent the pesticide and other pollutants of its ilk can be.

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A geoengineering scheme to solve climate change could hurt the Antarctic ozone layer, while recovery of the ozone hole could increase Antarctic warming, new research suggests. A study published Thursday in Science decries suggestions to solve climate change by spewing sulfur into the atmosphere, saying that such a scheme would wipe out the Arctic ozone layer and delay the healing of the ozone hole over Antarctica for up to seven decades. But hey, maybe that's not all bad: A paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that a full recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole could amplify warming in that region. So ... basically, we've just really screwed things up.

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Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet”

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A 160-square-mile chunk of ice -- that's seven times the size of Manhattan -- has collapsed off of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica. The entire ice shelf, which is approximately the size of Connecticut, is "hanging by a thread," says climate scientist David Vaughan: "We'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be." Scientists are not concerned that the ice breakage will have an immediate effect on sea-level rise, but, says researcher Sarah Das, such collapses are "more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system." Which is so not what we need right now.

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‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

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‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

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Antarctica holds about 90 percent of the Earth's ice, so it's a bit problematic that the continent seems to be melting faster than expected. Not only is large-scale ice loss more widespread than thought, but the rate of meltiness has accelerated over the last decade, says a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. The West Antarctic ice sheet lost about 132 billion tons of ice in 2006, compared to some 83 billion tons of ice in 1996. Unfortunately, many computer models of future climate impacts assume that Antarctic ice levels will be stable -- and thus may underestimate sea-level rise.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

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‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science

The World Wildlife Fund has been trying to gather support to establish a network of marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean in an attempt to mitigate increasing ecological pressures in the area from climate change, invasive species, and commercial fishing. The plight of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean has often been overlooked compared to the rapidly melting Arctic on the other side of the world. But recently the Antarctic has been getting increased attention -- not just for its melty future, but the predicted bonanza of ocean-floor mining and other exploration that the melt could open up. Britain's Foreign Office has confirmed it's preparing to submit claims to the United Nations for rights to some 385,000 square miles of sea floor in the Southern Ocean under the U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty. Britain hopes to convince the U.N. to declare the area an extension of its territories, including the British Antarctic Territory as well as the Falkland Islands and South Georgia off the southeast coast of Argentina. New Zealand and Australia have also claimed parts of the Southern Ocean; Argentina and Chile will likely do the same.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science