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sábado, 11 de setembro de 2010

Enorme bloco de gelo (do tamanho de Manhattan!) desagregou-se dum glaciar na Gronelândia

A 3 meses para a COP 16 no México e nenhum acordo global do clima à vista. Enquanto isso, a  temperatura média do planeta se eleva.
Fonte: Wired Science, 7 de Agosto
A 100-square-mile block of ice 600 feet thick has calved off one of the largest ocean-bordering glaciers in Greenland. The Arctic hasn’t lost a chunk of ice that large since 1962.
“In the early morning hours of Aug. 5, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” oceanographer Andreas Muenchow of University of Delaware said in a press release Aug. 6. “The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days.”
Petermann Glacier is located about 600 miles south of the North Pole. Muenchow and a team of scientists have been studying it since 2003. They had been expecting the glacier to calve, but this piece is much larger than anyone had anticipated.
The glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile-long floating ice-shelf.
The new chunk will enter Nares Straight, an ocean channel between Canada and Greenland, float towards Newfoundland and Labrador, and ultimately end up in the Atlantic Ocean.
The massive calving of the ice-shelf is likely part of a natural cycle for Petermann Glacier rather than a dramatic change that has never been seen before, Muenchow said.
“Petermann Glacier has stayed about the same size over the last century,” Muenchow said. “Well, up until yesterday.”
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Images: 1) Time-series animation based on satellite data from 31 July, 4 August, and 7 August 2010 showing the breaking of the Petermann glacier and the movement of the new iceberg towards Nares Strait/ European Space Agency. 2) Andreas Muenchow

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