A giant sheet of ice measuring 260 sq km (100 sq miles) has broken off a glacier in Greenland, according to researchers at a US university. Maybe this will get someone’s attention!
In the face of quibbling and time-wasting by these bastards that ask us to explain every small, cunt-hair detail, a block of ice separated from the Petermann Glacier, on the north-west coast of Greenland.
But it gets better! It is the largest Arctic iceberg to calve since 1962, according to my dear friend Prof Andreas Muenchow of the University of Delaware. The question most people want to ask now is: What happened in 1962 that made one bigger calve? The answer: It is very complicated and would take several hours to explain so much of the data that has gone into this research. So, in the interest of science and the precious little time we have left to live, would those of you with your clever questions just shut up for 5 seconds?
The ice could become frozen in place over winter or escape into the waters between Greenland and Canada. And what then? Ice escaping into waters where commercial and military ship movement is constant could portend a disaster of biblical proportions. I’m sorry? What was that? You don’t care?
Well Prof Muenchow agrees with me. A man named Professor Andreas Muenchow agrees with me. Not you. Me.
Cracks in the Petermann Glacier had been observed last year and it was expected that an iceberg would calve from it soon. And guess what? It did. Which means our observations were dead on. Those of us in the Green movement have been vilified as hysterical and politically tainted. Well, we saw cracks in that glacier and predicted it would calve and it did just like we said. What’s that got to do with politics?
The glacier is 1,000 km (620 miles) south of the North Pole. We know that because we measured the distance. We weren’t just sitting around writing dummy memos and “purging” files. (It’s called “deleting unnecessary files” and it’s done all the time so why we in the enviromental movement should be suspect is anyone’s guess)
A researcher at the Canadian Ice Service detected the calving from Nasa satellite images taken early on Thursday, according to dear Professor Muenchow. I hesitate to add that those are government-generated images and are always subject to censorship, editing and blatant photo-shopping but in this instance, since they agree with our conclusions, they are amazing!
The images showed that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 70km-long (43-mile) floating ice shelf. That’s right. You read correctly. It lost almost half of it’s 79km-long (56 mile) floating ice shelf.
There was enough fresh water locked up in the ice island to “keep all US public tap water flowing for 120 days,” said Prof Muenchow. So the Professor is saying we have enough fresh water in those glaciers to supply us for years to come
Also, I just found out Professor Muenchow said it was not clear if the event was due to global warming.
The Professor, it appears, has gone over to the other side. I better write here and now that the first six months of 2010 have been the hottest on record globally even though I haven’t looked carefully at the data.
Oh and another thing. Thousands of icebergs calve off Greenland’s glaciers annually, yes….but they are seldom so large. There. Muenchow. Just like a kraut to bring a knife to a gunfight.
