Reason Why There's a Huge Cold Spot in the Atlantic between Greenland and Ireland and the UK

There are three extremely deep canyons in the southeast side of Greenland. The melt waters on top of Greenland's ice cap are forming des moulins bleues, running down to the bottom, pressing up on, cracking and melting the ice further, and flowing out to sea via these canyons.



There are three very deep canyons in southeastern Greenland, two close to the tip and one opposite Iceland.
 Image Credit: LiveScience.com, via Colorado Bob on Robertscribbler.

UPDATE: a couple of days ago, the Daily Kos came out with an important article on this very subject: Sudden drainage, via massive chasm, of Subglacial lakes in Greenland described as catastrophic.

Streams and rivers that form on top of the Greenland ice sheet during spring and summer are the main agent transporting melt runoff from the ice sheet to the ocean. Image Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Maria-José Viñas via the Daily Kos.

The Greenland ice sheet is the largest body of permanent ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Climate Change is happening swiftly in the Arctic, and consequently it is causing rapid and relentless melting of the sheet from both above (Albedo or dark ice) and below the ice due to warming ocean temperatures as well as large volumes of warm melt water at the bedrock). Most of us know that this run away melting is raising sea level rise across the Globe. The hydrologic system of the Greenland ice sheet is extremely complex and there has been little data about how it works for some time, but slowly we are beginning to solve some of it's mysteries. Each summer, the hydrological system becomes activated as massive amounts of melt water is produced on its surface, evaporates into the atmosphere, percolates into partially formed layers of ice, and feeds runoff into supraglacial lakes (a lake formed on top of the ice sheet), streams and rivers to the ice sheet margins. Recently 2 sub-glacial lakes were discovered in Greenland. These lakes form below the ice and can stay unfrozen for decades. Particularly unusual is the fact that these lakes are associated with Antarctica and not the Arctic. They were unknown there until recently. The sub-glacial lake can be stable for decades, but can drain in one season and refill quickly with melt water from the surface. We are familiar with the dramatic calving at marine terminating glaciers but what is less evident is the oddity of surface melting and what happens to the water for land terminating glaciers with it's sub and supra glacial lakes.

Scientists have discovered a crater, shown here, which had once been the site of a sub-glacial lake. Image credit: Ian Howat / DigitalGlobe Inc / Sci-News.com via the Daily Kos.

A 'whirlpool' and crack on the Petermann glacier. Geophysicist Dr Richard Bates, of the Scottish Oceans Institute at the University of St. Andrews, takes 'casts' of temperature, pressure, current and salinity. He makes casts - dropping a CTD probe (Conductivity Temp Depth) into the pool and pulling it back up at a slow speed...
 Picture: NICK COBBING / GREENPEACE via the Daily Kos.

The central mystery related to Greenland hydrology is how much melt water is lost to the ocean and thereby contributing to the rate of global sea level rise. Prior to late 2013, many thought that the bedrock under the ice sheet was relatively flat and that melt from inland glaciers would pond there and perhaps not contribute to SLR. "We now know that there are many channels in the bedrock. These channels potentially connects the interior ice-sheet, its plumbing, and melt water to Petermann Fjord".

Hidden under a mile of ice is a canyon that stretches for at least 465 miles from Greenland’s interior to its northwest coast at Petermann Fjord. NASA's Operation Ice Bridge found that parts of the canyon are a half mile deep and over 6 miles wide. The Grand Canyon in Arizona, for comparison purposes, is 277 miles long and over a mile at its deepest and 18 miles at it's widest. The researchers who discovered it have named it "paleofluvial megacanyon". Not a sexy name to be sure, but the name means that the "canyon was carved by an ancient river well before Greenland’s ice sheet covered it up some 3.5 million years ago".

Climate Central notes the potential feedback loops. They are disturbing and grim.

Increased ice melt from this, as well as other surface melting due to increasing air temperatures could make Greenland a major contributor to sea level rise by the end of the 21st century. The melting of Greenland’s glaciers has also added a large boost of freshwater to the North Atlantic which could alter ocean currents and the ocean’s ability to take up carbon dioxide.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/09/22/1421761/-Sudden-drainage-via-massive-chasm-of-Subglacial-lakes-in-Greenland-described-as-catastrophic

The ice melt will continue and increase. Combined with unexpected Methane clathrate releases, it quickly could really mess up our coastal settlements and seaports, among causing other very unwelcome things. 

The Impossible Just Happened in Texas

From Business Insider:

In the wee hours of the morning on Sunday, the mighty state of Texas was asleep.

The honky-tonks in Austin were shuttered, the air-conditioned office towers of Houston were powered down, and the wind whistled through the dogwood trees and live oaks on the gracious lawns of Preston Hollow.

Out in the desolate flats of West Texas, the same wind was turning hundreds of wind turbines, producing tons of electricity at a time when comparatively little supply was needed.

And then a very strange thing happened: The so-called spot price of electricity in Texas fell toward zero, hit zero, and then went negative for several hours.

Business Insider: The Impossible Just Happened in Texas

Extravagantly Wasteful Suburban Lifestyle in the Desert.

Note how all the portion of the California Desert Valley shown below is as green as all of Ireland, and how everything is sprawled out and accessible only by 4-lane and 6-lane highways. Utterly extravagant, as if Peak Oil were no object, and California were not presently in a water shortage.



"Homes and grassy fairways cover a swath of southern La Quinta on April 15, 2015."
Photo and Caption Credit: Jay Calderon/ Desert Sun (via dtlange / Robertscribbler). 

Herr Trump

Slightly OT from If Peak Oil Were No Object (The Donald does want to "make America great again" which requires no such thing as peak oil), but it's too good to pass up. This is a cartoon of Donald trump with his bad combover doing the Sieg Heil!. It's funny but it's also erroneous. Why? After the cartoon.

Cartoon Credit: © 2015 Lalo Alcaraz, Universal Uclick via Daily Kos. 

It's his TIE that should be doing the Sieg Heil, in acknowledgement of him. Much like a Dilbert tie.

On Global Warming and Ice Ages

From Robertscribbler:

Colorado Bob posted:

By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black was, according to his own notes, able to tell the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that what was then called the greenhouse effect was most likely caused by man-made CO2; a year later, speaking to an even wider audience inside the company, he said that research indicated that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, we would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius. That’s just about where the scientific consensus lies to this day. “Present thinking,” Black wrote in summary, “holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.”

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-exxon-knew-about-climate-change

And I responded: "And back then the news media were telling us that we were falling headlong into a new ice age. And it was not hard to believe them, in fact hard not to believe them, because they interviewed the minority of scientists who hypothesized that, and because Boston and New York Harbors had ice floes in them.

"Can we convict ExxonMobil — and the corporate media — of Crimes against Humanity, and Crimes against Nature, and sentence them to corporate death?"

Indeed. The time for decision according to Mr. Black was 1982-1987, that is, 33 to 28 years ago. Now we have blown through that and as a result, Earth's atmosphere has 405 ppm CO₂ and 480 ppm CO₂e.

Some Items from around the Net Today.

Three developments that are bad, the first very, very bad -- i.e., a new, almost fully-automated gigantic seaport. Very destructive of highly skilled, blue-collar jobs in my opinion. Let's see if this will be operational when fossil fuel extraction, particularly oil extraction, starts declining and in a big way.

From The Guardian - Inside the London megaport you didn’t know existed

London Gateway was built by Dubai, is twice the size of the City of London, is run by robots, has the world’s largest cranes – and it’s where everything you buy will soon come from. London’s docks are back in business.

…Running almost 3km along the Thames estuary is a £1.5bn new megaport that has literally redrawn the coastline of Essex, and wants to make equally radical shifts to the UK’s consumer supply chain.

Welcome to DP World London Gateway, the latest international trophy of the oil-rich emirate of Dubai, and one of the biggest privately funded infrastructure projects the UK has ever seen. It is a gargantuan undertaking (on the scale of Crossrail, Terminal 5 or HS2) that’s projected to have a bigger economic impact than the Olympics – but you might not even know it was happening. The port has been up and running for almost two years, with two of its six berths now complete and a third well on the way.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/sep/15/london-gateway-megaport-you-didnt-know-existed-docks?CMP=ema_565

As if this isn't already beginning to happen.

From ThinkProgress - This Is Your Brain On Climate Change

“We spend vast amounts of time and personal energy trying to calculate the most urgent threats posed by climate change. Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren, however, says the most insidious danger may already be upon us. She’s not talking about heat, drought, floods, severe storms, or rising seas. She’s focused on the psychological risks posed by global warming.

 Van Susteren has co-authored a report on the psychological effects of climate change that predicts Americans will suffer “depressive and anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, substance abuse, suicides, and widespread outbreaks of violence,” in the face of rising temperatures, extreme weather, and scarce resources. Van Susteren and her co-author Kevin Coyle write that counselors and first responders “are not even close to being prepared to handle the scale and intensity of impacts that will arise from the harsher conditions and disasters that global warming will unleash.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/09/16/3701936/brain-on-climate-change/

And thanks to the developments in the Jet Stream that Jennifer Francis predicted, there is already climate warming amplification in the Arctic -- about 2x or more the global average temperature anamoly since 1880.

From Eureka Alert - Arctic mosquitoes thriving under climate change, Dartmouth study finds

HANOVER, N.H. – Warming temperatures are causing Arctic mosquitoes to grow faster and emerge earlier, significantly boosting their population and threatening the caribou they feast on, a Dartmouth College study finds.

The study predicts the mosquitoes’ probability of surviving and emerging as adults will increase by more than 50 percent if Arctic temperatures rise 2 °C. The findings are important because changes in the timing and intensity of their emergence affect their role as swarming pests of people and wildlife, as pollinators of tundra plants and as food for other species, including Arctic and migratory birds.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-09/dc-amt090915.php

Well here's a good development which hopefully won't be adversely affected by peak oil. Check out the photo of the interior of one of the apartments: the poster on the wall is actually a site plan of the constructed apartment complex -- looks very New Urban.

Return of the prefabs: inside Richard Rogers' Y:Cube homes for homeless people

With riotously bright colours, Rogers’s ‘move-on’ housing scheme is dressed in the child-like garb of a My First House. But design niggles mean nothing to the tenants getting their own homes for the first time.

Photograph Credit: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

“I still can’t quite believe that the same architects who designed Terminal 5 and the Cheesegrater have designed my house,” says Wendy Omollo. “To have people as grand as that doing low-cost housing projects is really quite amazing.”

Omollo has been homeless since January, but this week she will join 35 others when she moves into the YMCA’s first factory-built “move-on” housing scheme, designed by none other than multi-award winning, international airport designing Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. While Richard Rogers’ practice graces this year’s Stirling prize shortlist for the sixth time, with the controversial Neo Bankside development and its £22m penthouses, it might come as a surprise to learn that a little further south, in the London borough of Merton, his office has just completed this scheme for a cost of around £45,000 per apartment, to be rented at less than the council’s affordable housing allowance.

Developed over the last few years in partnership with the YMCA London South West, manufacturers SIG and project managers Aecom, this 36-unit “Y:Cube” project is the practice’s latest foray into off-site manufactured housing, a dream Richard Rogers has entertained since his “Zip-Up” concept house in the 1960s – an unrealised fantasy of a modular pink prefab pod on stilts.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/sep/08/inside-richard-rogers-ycube-homes-for-homeless-people

End Triassic, End Permian, End Eocene Extinctions Marked by SEVERE C-13 Carbon Release.

This information was posted recently by Leland Palmer at Robertscribbler's latest article, New Study — Risk of Significant Methane Release From East Siberian Arctic Shelf Still Growing:

During previous mass extinction events, carbon isotope excursions consistent with the release of hundreds of billions or trillions of tons of carbon from the methane hydrates occurred. This has happened several times, not just once or twice. 

Generally there is flood basalt activity going on, releasing massive amounts of CO2, much like our current fossil fuel use. But the flood basalt activity generally seems to precede the sharp mass extinction event, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of years, and often seems to go on after the mass extinction event. 

Methane release from the hydrates, triggered by flood basalt release of CO2, is the best mass extinction hypothesis to explain all of the geological evidence, I think. The sudden methane release hypothesis has the most explanatory power, the most predictive ability, and even makes quantitative predictions that turn out to be correct. It is consistent with all the geological evidence. When a new claim is made that contradicts the methane release hypothesis, that claim generally does not hold up, and turns out to be wrong. 

The methane release hypothesis turns out to be a unifying theory – it constitutes a general theory of most or maybe all mass extinctions.

Link: http://robertscribbler.com/2015/09/10/new-study-risk-of-significant-methane-release-from-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-still-growing/#comment-51528. Nota bene an excellent graphic of the End-Triassic with C-13 content spike consistent with the End-Triassic mass extinction.

Leland Palmer further notes that we don't want an End-Anthropocene extinction either, but with all the fossil fuels we've combusted up so far we just might get it. With 6,800 billion tons of methane clathrates in the Arctic and 1,600 billion tons of Carbon in the Arctic permafrost, I agree.

UPDATE: Mr. Palmer has since posted a graphic of the  negative Carbon Isotope Excursion (CIE) from the End Permian -- the mother of all smelly hothouse extinctions.

Link: http://robertscribbler.com/2015/09/10/new-study-risk-of-significant-methane-release-from-east-siberian-arctic-shelf-still-growing/#comment-51661

These repeated sudden CIE events, coupled with hyperthermal mass extinction events, are good consistent evidence of methane release from the hydrates. There have been maybe 20 or more of these flood basalt eruption / sudden negative CIE / extinction events, and hundreds of smaller apparent releases, I think. So, maybe our hydrates are less stable than we think.

Considering that the hydrates up in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are already letting loose, I think they are a LOT less stable!