Greenland Iceberg Four Times Bigger Than Manhattan Breaks Off Glacier

WASHINGTON — A giant ice island has broken off the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland.

A University of Delaware researcher says the floating ice sheet covers 100 square miles – more than four times the size of New York's Manhattan Island.

Andreas Muenchow, who is studying the Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada, said the ice sheet broke off early Thursday. He says the new ice island was discovered by Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service.

Not since 1962 has such a large chunk of ice calved in the Arctic, but researchers have noticed cracks in recent months in the floating tongue of the glacier.

Comments

[lesterbud]

11:22 AM on 08/17/2010

Why is it that these bagger-types hate:
Gays
Muslims
Blacks
Hispanics
Socialists
Communists
Liberals
Progressives
Gun Controls
Poor People
Health Care Reform
Financial Reform
and even Social Security (when instructed to do so)

But they can not whip up even the tiniest concern for the potential presented by all of the collective facts regarding climate change?
Can their social/political belief structure really be that narrow and self-destructive?

[Richard2]

10:52 AM on 08/20/2010

There is an old saying among lawyers that when you have the facts on your side, you argue the facts. When you don't have the facts on your side, you attack your opponent.

From this entry, it appears you don't have any facts on your side. Therefore, you can only attack those who may, to some degree, disagree with you.

[maxwells]

01:36 PM on 08/20/2010

but since you never have facts on your side, that's exactly what you do, Richard2. You attack the credibility of climate scientists incessantly. Then when a series of independent reviews exonerate said scientists completely, you then incessantly attack the credibility of those reviews.

And what do you use for those attacks? A bunch of trash from trash web sites, plus your own opinion pulled out of thin air.

On the other hand, you can hardly deny your own trail, right here on HuffPo:

www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Richard2?action=comments&display=all&sort=newest

Your latest stats:

morning of Aug. 20th, 2 new denying anthropogenic climate change posts (DACCP).
Date DACCP
8/18 2
8/17 6
8/16 6
8/15 5
8/14 2
8/13 3
8/11 7
8/10 2
8/09 3
8/07 7
8/06 5
8/05 3
8/04 7
8/03 3
8/02 3
8/01 5

69 DACCP during August, 2010, compared to 18 in his first 20 days on the job, starting 2/18/2009.

So, as he gathered misleading talking points, he upped his throughput. But still, nearly all his posts deny anthropogenic climate change. AnthropologistAmongApes says he found one that didn't; I haven't.found ANY.

Who but PAID SHILLs post exclusively on just one topic?”

[HOWMANYTIMES]

10:38 AM on 08/17/2010

Hey , Globalphobiacs..... the ice berg broke off because the Petermann Glacier HAS BEEN GROWING

[GoodandBadnews]

09:14 AM on 08/17/2010

and yet there is more sea ice on the planet than in 1979. The Arctic is rebounding from the 2007 low and the Antarctic is at its highest level ever.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/sea-ice-page/

[maxwells]

01:39 PM on 08/20/2010

nother trash web site that would never survive any sort of honest peer review. Watts has been caught bald-face lying innumerable times.

[dbmetzger]

12:53 PM on 08/13/2010

Ice Island Breaks Off Greenland Glacier
Scientists tell a US committee that an ice island four times the size of Manhattan is not evidence of global warming. http://www.newslook.com/videos/240435-ice-island-breaks-off-greenland-glacier?autoplay=true
From the flat earth society. 9 out of 10 scientists think otherwise but we continue to hear from the deniers, as if all opinions must be balanced.

[Richard2]

08:09 PM on 08/11/2010

"Muenchow said he had expected an ice chunk to break off from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest remaining ones in Greenland, because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years. But he did not expect it to be so large."'

....because it had been growing in size for seven or eight years.

[Publicola]

11:47 AM on 08/12/2010

Richard2, given all the time you spend on this subject you do understand that global warming leads to more snowfall in areas that are below freezing, including on Greenland... right?

[Exusian]

12:41 PM on 08/12/2010

Which means that the Petermann has been conveying a lot of ice out of the Greenland ice sheet over the last 7 or 8 years, but of course Richard will never concede that obvious fact.

[Ali Rockwood]

05:45 PM on 08/11/2010

so when this thing melts, will it affect sea levels?

[jesthefaxman]

09:05 PM on 08/10/2010

Can someone strap a tow rope to it and pull it somewhere? Is there a chance it could be adversely possessed? Is there an ownership possibility for a floating piece of ice.

(innocent question really with no particular motive)

[MCJanes]

11:35 PM on 08/10/2010

It's four times bigger than Manhattan...that would require an awfully large rope.

No, to all your questions. Assuming it follows the usual course, it will break up into much smaller icebergs by the time it reaches Canada's East Coast...80% of it will melt underwater, remember.

And nobody can possess an iceberg, beyond the country whose water it happens to be in. People are still free to use them as tourist destinations, though...Iceberg watching has really blown up in the past couple of decades, and so has bottling the ice for water and such (Iceberg Vodka/Rum is particularly delicious).

I've seen countless icebergs float by where I live over the years, and each one is as mesmerizing as the last. Really a sight to see.

[jesthefaxman]

08:03 AM on 08/11/2010

Thanks for your thoughtful reply

[daultman463]

05:47 PM on 08/12/2010

cc

[Exusian]

07:51 PM on 08/10/2010

Based on the NSIDC Arctic sea ice extent charts
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_daily_extent_hires.png
http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100804_Figure4.png
the Northern Sea Route along the Arctic coast of Russia is almost clear, and is probably already be navigable all the way through with ice breaker assistance in the two tight sections.

Meanwhile, the MODIS satellite images show the northern route of the Northwest Passage is already clear all the way through the Perry Channel and the McClure Strait, although the western approach is still blocked by disintagrating pack ice:
http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2010/08/animation-11-canadian-archipelago.html

[Richard2]

09:15 PM on 08/29/2010

Right, we need that "ice breaker assistance" which must cost someone a pretty penny. Great idea, shipping goods through unpredictable ice fields that continually move, and seasonally grow and shrink. Just so you don't have to pay for the ice breaker ship.

[maxwells]

11:20 AM on 08/30/2010

13 posts Sunday,.all denying global warming and its impacts. Richard2's mini-vacay must've cut into his quota.

www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Richard2?action=comments

[GERTRUDE GERTIE SCHOLL]

07:38 PM on 08/10/2010

The worlds largest iceberg was the the gigantic B15-A iceberg 115-kilometer-long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBfzFt_kgNU

[ScapeGoat]

02:17 PM on 08/10/2010

Where are all the trolls?
Have then gone back under their bridges?

[Exusian]

07:10 PM on 08/10/2010

They're sh*tting their pants now that Medvedev is publicly saying that the unprecedented once in a thousand year* heat wave in Russia is at least in part caused by global warming:

“practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot. What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, …in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.”

*Alexander Frolov of the Russian Meteorological Center:

"We have an ‘archive’ of abnormal weather situations stretching over a thousand years. It is possible to say there was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat"

http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/09/russia-heat-wave-one-thousand-years-global-warming/

Oops, there goes Russia as a fellow traveler of the denialsphere and and its efforts to prevent implementation of a global policy to combat global warming/climate change.

[ScapeGoat]

08:50 PM on 08/10/2010

See, that is why I fanned you a while ago, using facts to make your argument..
So, since I can't fan you again, I can mark as favorite.

[mamacat]

08:08 AM on 08/10/2010

I was reading elsewhere about this thing. Four times the size of Manhattan, it will take about two years before it enters the North Atlantic, and there have been much larger ice islands. Amazing.

The last time there was one this big, 1962, I remember was also the last time in snowed in Santa Monica. I wonder what this winter is going to hold in store for Southern Cal.

[Richard2]

02:05 PM on 08/10/2010

The iceberg calved in 1962 was more than twice the size of the new one. In addition, glaciers calve thousands of icebergs every year, of widely varying size. This is a perfectly normal, non-extraordinary event. It is nice to see that natural events are still occurring as they always have. Remember that an iceberg sank the Titanic about a hundred years ago

[maxwells]

06:14 PM on 08/10/2010

So, Richard2: are you really an honest sceptic like you pretend to be, or just another paid shill for some right wing think tank or fossil fuel lobbyist? And what's with your 1450+ posts, almost all of them on climate change? How come you've posted exclusively on one and only one topic in HuffPo ever since your first post? Who does that other than a paid shill?

And what's with the sly equivocation when we ask you these simple questions? What are you hiding, exactly? Why does it matter?

[g-moi]

11:12 AM on 08/11/2010

There are many warnings right now about man made pollution. Just check out the dead fish off of Massachusetts.

Whether you believe in global warming or not, ask yourself these questions.
Do you want to breathe clean air?
Do you want to drink clean water?

[wespenn56]

11:55 PM on 08/09/2010

Rising temperatures over the last 20 years, record heat waves world wide this year, melting glaciers and ice floes larger than Manhattan. Don't worry, just remember, climate change is a liberal conspiracy.

[ScapeGoat]

02:04 PM on 08/10/2010

Yep, and this proves the earth is cooling (sarcasm)

[DrCardio]

10:59 PM on 08/09/2010

All this sciency intelligency stuff is not in the bible.

[shellest]

04:37 PM on 08/09/2010

I don't find it helpful to whittle down our relationship to the planet to an arguement on whether or not global warming is real. That is not the point to me. Instead, I wonder are there areas in my life where I waste things? Time, energy, water, food? Can I change these habits? That is where my work comes in.

[imfedup]

11:38 AM on 08/11/2010

So you can't be concerned with both things? Does there have to be only one point?

[psilocynic]

04:33 PM on 08/09/2010

OH NOEZ!!!! We"re all going to die!!!

[DrCardio]

10:59 PM on 08/09/2010

I'd rather not take the chance.