Doomsday Glacier

[RinkyDink]

Interesting article. Worth a read.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/fe ... er-w481260

--Snip--

by drilling ice cores and taking other measurements, they discovered that the ground beneath the ice was on a reverse slope and had been depressed further by the weight of the glaciers over millions of years. "Think of it as a giant soup bowl filled with ice," says Sridhar Anandakrishnan, an expert in polar glaciology at Penn State University.

In the bowl analogy, the edge of these glaciers – the spot where a glacier leaves the land and begins to float – is perched on the lip of the bowl 1,000 feet or more below sea level. Scientists call that lip the "grounding line." Below the lip, the terrain falls away on a downward slope for hundreds of miles, all the way to the Transantarctic Mountains that divide East and West Antarctica. At the deepest part of the basin, the ice is about two miles thick.

[oldmansurfer]

I hope to still be surfing when that glacier melts. It is an interesting read

[RinkyDink]

I hope to still be surfing when that glacier melts. It is an interesting read

Could be a whole slew of new surf breaks in Manhattan.

[oldmansurfer]

Initially I thought it was going to a post something like this

[RinkyDink]

Initially I thought it was going to a post something like this

Things could get a little more intense down in West Antarctica.

--snip--

After the Larsen B collapse, Alley started thinking more about Mercer's prophecy in West Antarctica, especially as it applied to Thwaites Glacier. He knew that the calving front on Thwaites was about 90 miles long and almost 1,800 feet high – all but 300 feet or so of that was underwater. The pressure of the ocean supported the underwater portion of the glacier, but the rest of it was just a tottering wall of ice that was propped up, for the moment, by ice shelves. And Alley knew that if the glacier retreated into thicker and thicker ice, the calving front would only get higher. How tall, he wondered, could an ice cliff stand before inherent weaknesses in the ice caused it to topple over? Alley knew that by the time Thwaites was fully retreated into the basin, the ice cliffs could theoretically be 6,000 feet high – twice as high as El Capitan, the famous granite face in Yosemite Valley. Imagine mile-high cliffs collapsing into the sea. It is a surreal notion, one that even the most lurid disaster-movie screenwriter would consider implausible. But Alley wondered if such an event was possible. And if so, how fast could it happen?

[oldmansurfer]

I am sure if the big wave crew is believing this stuff they are figuring out ways to ride the tidal wave created by a massive chunk of ice falling into the ocean after all it is probably more predictable than regular ocean waves. They will know where to be and close to when to be there. It may represent their chance to ride the 100 foot plus wave. But all in the future

[oldmansurfer]

Here is another article about Antartica melting http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/05/16/is-antarctica-gaining-or-losing-ice-nature-may-have-settled-the-debate/#.WRuqXOvyvct