1 November 2016, The Guardian, Great Barrier Reef: why are government and business perpetuating the big lie? At the core of the Australian government’s failure to protect our Great Barrier Reef is the big lie. Through its actions and inaction, rhetoric, funding priorities and policy decisions, the Australian government has implicitly pursued the line that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming. This is the big lie. Last year, when the federal and Queensland governments released the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, experts were emphatic about the deceit. Eminent coral reef scientist Prof Terry Hughes commented that the “biggest omission in the plan is that it virtually ignores climate change, which is clearly the major ongoing threat to the reef”. Great Barrier Reef historian Iain McCalman wrote that the new measures “deliberately ignore the dire long-term threats to the reef that are contained in the now unutterable words ‘climate change’”. “They are akin to investing in cures for a patient’s skin diseases while ignoring their cancer symptoms,” he wrote. As the experts make plain, any attempt to decouple the future of the Great Barrier Reef from the quest to contain global warming is simply dishonest. As another expert, Prof Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland, has said, we either “re-examine the current plans for unrestricted coal exports, taking proper account and responsibility for the resulting greenhouse emissions, or watch the reef die”. Read More here
Tag Archives: oceans
27 October 2016, Aust Antarctic Division, Impact of East Antarctic glacial melt on sea-level rise. The Australian Antarctic Program will study two glaciers, the Totten and Sørsdal, in East Antarctica this summer to better understand the impact ice melt is having on global sea-level rise. The Totten Glacier, near Australia’s Casey research station, is the largest glacier in East Antarctica, and is showing signs that it is sensitive to warm ocean waters that can increase melt at the base of the ice shelf. Australian Antarctic Division Glaciologist, Dr Ben Galton-Fenzi, said researchers want to better understand how much this glacial melt is driving sea-level rise. “Since the 1900s the global sea-level has risen by around 20 centimetres and by the end of the century it’s projected to rise by up to one metre or more, but this is subject to high uncertainty,” Dr Galton Fenzi said. “These estimates depend critically on understanding Antarctic glaciers, both how much and how fast they melt in a warming climate. This summer researchers will look at how warmer ocean water is melting glaciers and ice shelves from below. “We will land helicopters on the Totten to deploy six GPS units to measure glacial flow speeds and surface elevation changes. Read More here
24 October 2016, NASA, Studies offer new glimpse of melting under Antarctic glaciers. Two new studies by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), detect the fastest ongoing rates of glacier retreat ever observed in West Antarctica and offer an unprecedented direct view of intense ice melting from the floating undersides of glaciers. The results highlight how the interaction between ocean conditions and the bedrock beneath a glacier can influence the glacier’s evolution, with implications for understanding future ice loss from Antarctica and global sea level rise. The two studies examined three neighboring glaciers in West Antarctica that are melting and retreating at different rates. Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers flow into the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica, the part of the continent with the largest loss of ice mass. A study led by Bernd Scheuchl of UCI, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Aug. 28, used radar measurements from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite and data from the earlier ERS-1 and ERS-2 satellites to look at changes in the glaciers’ grounding lines — the boundary where a glacier loses contact with bedrock and begins to float on the ocean. The grounding line is important because nearly all glacier melting takes place on the underside of the glacier’s floating portion, called the ice shelf. If a glacier loses mass from enhanced melting, it may start floating farther inland from its former grounding line, just as a boat stuck on a sandbar may be able to float again if a heavy cargo is removed. This is called grounding line retreat. Read More here
20 October 2016, Climate Home, Antarctic ice shelf collapse pits fishing against science. The UK is calling for a ten-year fishing moratorium in seas vacated by Antarctica’s collapsing ice shelves. The proposal, which was shared with Climate Home, passed the scientific committee of the UN Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) on Thursday. Russia has the power to veto the move when it goes to a full commission debate in Tasmania next week, however, and has consistently opposed territorial limits to fishing vessels in the far south. The collapse of an ice shelf provides a one-of-a-kind scientific laboratory, said Phil Trathan, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey and one of the authors of the proposal. The newly open waters provide a window into the hidden processes of ocean ecosystems. “All of these areas are covered by ice and when that goes then there’ll be a whole new community develop under there. And given that a lot of communities develop quite slowly in the Antarctic then we can look at how they develop through time,” said Trathan speaking from Hobart, where the CCAMLR meeting is taking place. “If fisheries are going to exploit those areas before we have a chance to look at them scientifically then it’s a lost opportunity.” Antartica’s great ice shelves project out over the ocean from the fringes of the land. They are in a state of rapid decline, losing a total of 310 cubic km of ice every year. Once a shelf becomes too thin to support its own weight, it collapses in dramatic style, as was witnessed by satellites when the 3,250 sq km Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated within a few months at the beginning of 2002. Read more here