Antarctica Melting 3x Faster Than We Thought

[Amerikuracana]

in a 1,000 years? sure. lol

They come every 15-20,000.. It's been a while.

 

[JonnyRingo84]

They come every 15-20,000.. It's been a while.

yea. 1k years from now? who cares? if humans still exist, we'll have terraformed mars or some other crazy shit and it wont matter.

global warming, be it man-influenced, or not, is changing things now.

 

[asdffdsa]

I checked the air in my tires last week. Some ive done my part

Good man. Keep that shit over-inflated by a few psi to squeeze out a couple more mpgs.

 

[MadSquabbles500]

Great there can now be a new land grab.

 

[Happy Man]

National Geographic earlier this year says the Antarctic ice is growing not melting.

Antarctic ice also was at record highs back in 2014.

Sounds like things freeze and melt in cycles. Imagine that

 

[oleDirtyBast4rd]

You cut out the part where I recommended that you read up on the topic, so I'll just repeat it. Scientists and environmentalist can do it much better than I can.

It can be complicated and technical, so get your info from experts.

Well that's not exactly gonna work with skeptics.

I think we are better off dealing with the issues that arise from rising temperatures rather than attempting to actually change the temperature itself. I believe the former is definitely possible while the latter is a waste of time and resources

 

[JbModest]

Clearly it is god's will.

 

[Anung Un Rama]

@Aegon Spengler

 

[tonni]

There's no magic bullet out there.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-cobalt-batteries/


Hype Meets Reality as Electric Car
Dreams Run Into Metal Crunch
By Elisabeth Behrmann, Jack Farchy and Sam Dodge
January 11, 2018
When BMW AG revealed it was designing electric versions of its X3 SUV and Mini, the going rate for 21 kilograms of cobalt—the amount of the metal needed to power typical car batteries—was under $600.

Only 16 months later, the price tag is approaching $1,700 and climbing by the day.

For carmakers vying to fill their fleets with electric vehicles, the spike has been a rude awakening as to how much their success is riding on the scarce silvery-blue mineral found predominantly in one of the world’s most corrupt and underdeveloped countries.

Rapid Rise
Cobalt prices stage one of the biggest jumps among commodities

$80K per metric ton

July 2017

Britain announces it will ban the sale of diesel and petrol cars in 2040

70

60

50

Sept. 2016

BMW announces e-Mini and e-X3 SUV

Sept. 2017

BMW announces a total of 12 new e-car models

40

March 2016

Tesla announces Model 3

30

20

2016

2017

2018

Source: London Metal Exchange

“It’s gotten more hectic over the past year,” said Markus Duesmann, BMW’s head of procurement, who’s responsible for securing raw materials used in lithium-ion batteries, such as cobalt, manganese and nickel. “We need to keep a close eye, especially on lithium and cobalt, because of the danger of supply scarcity.”

Like its competitors, BMW is angling for the lead in the biggest revolution in automobile transport since the invention of the internal combustion engine, with plans for 12 battery-powered models by 2025. What executives such as Duesmann hadn’t envisioned even two years ago, though, was that they’d suddenly need to become experts in metals prospecting.

Automakers are finding themselves in unfamiliar—and uncomfortable—terrain, where miners such as Glencore Plc and China Molybdenum Co. for the first time have all the bargaining power to dictate supplies.

“They’re a lot bigger—but the reality is guys like us are holding all the cards,” said Trent Mell, chief executive officer of First Cobalt Corp., which is mining the mineral in northern Ontario and setting up talks with automakers seeking long-term supplies.

A creuseur, or digger, descends into a copper and cobalt mine in Kawama, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Complicating the process is the fact that the cobalt trail inevitably leads to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where corruption is entrenched in everyday business practices. The U.S. last month slapped sanctions on Glencore’s long-time partner in Congo, Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, saying he used his close ties to Congolese President Joseph Kabila to secure mining deals.

There’s also another ethical obstacle to negotiate. The African nation produces more than 60 percent of the world’s cobalt, a fifth of which is drawn out by artisanal miners who work with their hands — some of whom are children. The country is also planning to double its tax on the metal.

Mined Cobalt Output in 2016
Democratic Republic of the Congo dominates supply of the silvery-blue metal

14% Other

4% Australia

3% Russia

3% Zambia

60% Democratic

Republic of the

Congo

3% New Caledonia

3% Cuba

4% Philippines

6% Canada

Source: Macquarie Research Report, October 2017

Automakers may not have the luxury of choice as countries across the world ban gas and diesel engines to slash carbon emissions.

If each of the billion cars on the road were replaced today with a Tesla Model X, 14 million tonnes of cobalt would be needed—twice global reserves. Even a more realistic scenario for people to drive 30 million electric cars by 2030 requires output to be more than trebled, according to a study commissioned by Glencore from commodity analysts CRU Group.

The projections have made the lustrous metal, a byproduct of copper and nickel mining, into one of the most coveted commodities. Its price surged 128 percent in the past 12 months, in part because hedge funds including Swiss-based Pala Investments stockpiled thousands of tonnes of the stuff, which is used to power everything from mobile phones to home electronics.

“There just isn’t enough cobalt to go around,” said George Heppel, a consultant at CRU. “The auto companies that’ll be the most successful in maintaining long-term stability in terms of raw materials will be the ones that purchase the cobalt and then supply that to their battery manufacturer.”

To adjust to the new reality, some carmakers are recruiting geologists to learn more about the minerals that may someday be as important to transport as oil is now. Tesla Inc. just hired an engineer who supervised a nickel-cobalt refinery in New Caledonia for Vale SA to help with procurement.

But after decades of dictating terms with suppliers of traditional engine parts, the industry is proving ill-prepared to confront what billionaire mining investor Robert Friedland dubbed “the revenge of the miner.”

Scarce Metal
As electric car production takes off, cobalt supplies are projected to fall short of demand

Passenger electric vehicles

Electric buses

Consumer electronics

Other

500K metric tons

400

300

200

Projected

100

Supply

0

2005

2010

2015

2020

2025

2030

Sources: Bloomberg New Energy Finance, USGS, Avicenne, CRU

Take Volkswagen AG. The world’s biggest automaker has one of the industry’s most ambitious targets for battery car sales. Cobalt producers spurned its attempt in September to get long-term cobalt supplies at prices fixed well below market rates. Two months later, Volkswagen wooed them to meetings at its 30,000-seat stadium in the German city of Wolfsburg, hosting each in a separate hospitality box.

The carmaker has eased its price demands and may succeed in securing cobalt supplies this year, according to people familiar with the talks.

This is in itself not a bad point; "alternative" energy or green energy isn't that alternative or green at all, when you examine it in its entirety.

 

[tonni]

That may be true and we have to act like it is. It certainly seems like it must be true- enough so that our inaction is a major mistake. It's not as if evolution can keep up with these fast changes. We may find ourselves genetically modifying every other organism in desperation.

Yeah, we'll be struggling with the headache while ignoring the brain tumor. The major problem is that there's no predicting what will happen in the next couple of decades. We're now really experiencing the climate change from the 70's. Earth takes a while to respond and there are so many variables it's basically impossible to predict.

 

[Madmick]

Nature and Leeds Uni is a NASA funded and executed research organization?

Let’s face it. No one has a fucking clue what’s going on or what will happen.

And even if we are the cause and could stop it, no one is quartering their electricity usage or turning their car off.

They're not confused. You're confused. I'd estimate you want people to perceive them as confused because it conforms to silly political prejudices you have.

New Study Brings Antarctic Ice Loss Into Sharper Focus
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-study-brings-antarctic-ice-loss-into-sharper-focus

A NASA study based on an innovative technique for crunching torrents of satellite data provides the clearest picture yet of changes in Antarctic ice flow into the ocean. The findings confirm accelerating ice losses from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and reveal surprisingly steady rates of flow from its much larger neighbor to the east.

The computer-vision technique crunched data from hundreds of thousands of NASA-U.S. Geological Survey Landsat satellite images to produce a high-precision picture of changes in ice-sheet motion.

The new work provides a baseline for future measurement of Antarctic ice changes and can be used to validate numerical ice sheet models that are necessary to make projections of sea level. It also opens the door to faster processing of massive amounts of data.

“We’re entering a new age,” said the study’s lead author, cryospheric researcher Alex Gardner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “When I began working on this project three years ago, there was a single map of ice sheet flow that was made using data collected over 10 years, and it was revolutionary when it was published back in 2011. Now we can map ice flow over nearly the entire continent, every year. With these new data, we can begin to unravel the mechanisms by which the ice flow is speeding up or slowing down in response to changing environmental conditions.”

The innovative approach by Gardner and his international team of scientists largely confirms earlier findings, though with a few unexpected twists.

Among the most significant: a previously unmeasured acceleration of glacier flow into Antarctica’s Getz Ice Shelf, on the southwestern part of the continent -- likely a result of ice-shelf thinning.

Speeding up in the west, steady flow in the east

The research, published in the journal “The Cryosphere,” also identified the fastest speed-up of Antarctic glaciers during the seven-year study period. The glaciers feeding Marguerite Bay, on the western Antarctic Peninsula, increased their rate of flow by 1,300 to 2,600 feet (400 to 800 meters) per year, probably in response to ocean warming.

Perhaps the research team’s biggest discovery, however, was the steady flow of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. During the study period, from 2008 to 2015, the sheet had essentially no change in its rate of ice discharge -- ice flow into the ocean. While previous research inferred a high level of stability for the ice sheet based on measurements of volume and gravitational change, the lack of any significant change in ice discharge had never been measured directly.

The study also confirmed that the flow of West Antarctica’s Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers into the ocean continues to accelerate, though the rate of acceleration is slowing.

In all, the study found an overall ice discharge for the Antarctic continent of 1,929 gigatons per year in 2015, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 40 gigatons. That represents an increase of 36 gigatons per year, plus or minus 15, since 2008. A gigaton is one billion tons.

The study found that ice flow from West Antarctica -- the Amundsen Sea sector, the Getz Ice Shelf and Marguerite Bay on the western Antarctic Peninsula -- accounted for 89 percent of the increase.

Computer vision

The science team developed software that processed hundreds of thousands of pairs of images of Antarctic glacier movement from Landsats 7 and 8, captured from 2013 to 2015.

These were compared to earlier radar satellite measurements of ice flow to reveal changes since 2008.

“We’re applying computer vision techniques that allow us to rapidly search for matching features between two images, revealing complex patterns of surface motion,” Gardner said.

Instead of researchers comparing small sets of very high-quality images from a limited region to look for subtle changes, the novelty of the new software is that it can track features across hundreds of thousands of images per year -- even those of varying quality or obscured by clouds -- over an entire continent.

“We can now automatically generate maps of ice flow annually -- a whole year -- to see what the whole continent is doing,” Gardner said.

The new Antarctic baseline should help ice sheet modelers better estimate the continent’s contribution to future sea level rise.

“We’ll be able to use this information to target field campaigns, and understand the processes causing these changes,” Gardner said. “Over the next decade, all this is going to lead to rapid improvement in our knowledge of how ice sheets respond to changes in ocean and atmospheric conditions, knowledge that will ultimately help to inform projections of sea level change.”

If that's too complicated for you just go back to watching TV. Let the smart people at NASA sort it out. They got us to the moon. Should carry some street cred.

 

[luckyshot]

National Geographic earlier this year says the Antarctic ice is growing not melting.

Antarctic ice also was at record highs back in 2014.

Sounds like things freeze and melt in cycles. Imagine that

This is a really simple misunderstanding between "spreading" and "growing." They aren't the same.

Guess what happens as a really big chunk of ice melts? It spreads out.

 

[OverCoronavirus Pressure]

Stop being sheeple.
Antarctica can't melt steel beams.

Also, wtf with no ants there

 

[kpt018]

Well that's not exactly gonna work with skeptics.

I think we are better off dealing with the issues that arise from rising temperatures rather than attempting to actually change the temperature itself. I believe the former is definitely possible while the latter is a waste of time and resources

You have to educate yourself on the topic man. The whole argument is that human activity is raising the temperature on the planet and it only takes a degree or two increments to see the damage and that speaks nothing to the unseen damage (to wildlife, environment, etc.). I just urge people to look into it.

 

[Andy Capp]

This is in itself not a bad point; "alternative" energy or green energy isn't that alternative or green at all, when you examine it in its entirety.

Nuclear power generation is really the best way to go for the next several decades but the problem is reactor build time. We could start now, say to replace all coal power plants with nuclear plants but it would take many years to build them and it might already be too late. I think it's still worth a try. They aren't nearly as dangerous as they used to be; just don't build any on fault lines like the silly Japanese.

Good thing I'm too old to be around when nearly every coastal city on earth gets flooded. And worse: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/risi...urning-rice-and-fish-into-junk-food-1.4696123

I hope I'm wrong but it's not looking good.

 

[Aegon Spengler]

We are denying there is currently a problem yes. It would help if people didn't sensationalize and pretend the sky is falling. What issue are you actually afraid of happening here?

People like you should have your balls cut off to stop you from reproducing.

 

[all caps]

So has anyone figured how to make the planet stop doing planetary things yet

 

[all caps]

I wonder if lions all get together and figure out how to make water stop evaporating from their water holes. Or if they just move to wherever the earth tells them to

 

[Fawlty]

So has anyone figured how to make the planet stop doing planetary things yet

Yep. We figured out how to make it heat up a lot faster than it can on its own. I wonder why you even post in these threads to drop your bumpkin slop.

 

[chardog]

I'll start believing in man made global warming as soon as rich fucks that live on Newport Bay, start abandoning their homes.

if tides are rising at alarming rates, I expect that stunners on Balboa that go for 30M will be abandoned. Someone please wake me up when that happens, proof is in the pudding.