Uunartoq Qeqertoq
Uunartoq Qeqertoq: is Inuit for the warming island. That’s what Dennis Schmitt, a 60-year-old Arctic explorer names his new-found island off the coast of Greenland. It used to be part of the continent, so people thought, until the ice bridge melted over the past few years. Mr. Schmitt discovered it during an ocean voyage in 2005.
“We are already in a new era of geography,” said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. “This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now.”
In August, Mr. Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.
“We saw it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going,” he said.
Of course they’re lying. Global Warming or Climate Change is not really happening. Ask any staunch conservative and they’ll tell you that it’s a grand conspiracy to undermine the economy of the United States. Surely a nation as powerful as ours cannot be beaten in an all-out war, so our enemies, led no doubt by the nefarious French, are attempting a ruse to destroy us through subterfuge. Now the damn Europeans are pretending that the melting of a few little glaciers are a problem.
The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
“That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Dr. Boggild said. “If you lose that much volume you’d definitely see new islands appear.”
"More lies," says our government. "Earth is a big place, surely the liquefaction of a few ice cubes is insignificant. If it is really happening. You can’t believe everything you hear these days. These people are just alarmist, pinko, greenie Communists."
The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime “glacial earthquakes” have been detected within the ice sheet.
“The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate,” said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. “But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible.”
[…]
Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming.
[…]
“When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work, which puts us on shaky ground,” said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.
[…]
“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.
On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
“Here in Miami,” Dr. Leatherman said, “we’re going to have an ocean on both sides of us.”
American university professors? How dare they show their Socialistic tendencies! What we need is a modern McCarthy to put them in their place. That’ll teach them to buck the party line of the glorious Neocon American Century!