[url=http://news.discovery.com/earth/antarctica-melting-warming-penguins-101214.html]Antarctic Melting as Deep Ocean Heat Rises[/url]
Big melting along the Antarctic coast has researchers realizing that the deep sea has been holding Earth’s warming.
Global warming is sneaky. For more than a century it has been hiding large amounts of excess heat in the world’s deep seas. Now that heat is coming to the surface again in one of the worst possible places: Antarctica.
New analyses of the heat content of the waters off Western Antarctic Peninsula are now showing a clear and exponential increase in warming waters undermining the sea ice raising air temperatures melting glaciers and wiping out entire penguin colonies.
“In the area I work there is the highest increase in temperatures of anywhere on Earth” said physical oceanographer Doug Martinson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“Eighty-seven percent of the alpine glaciers are in retreat” said Martinson of the Western Antarctic Peninsula.
“When I saw that my jaw just dropped” said Martinson. The most dramatic rise has happened since 1960 he said.
What the rising water heat means he said is that even if humanity got organized and soon stopped emitting greenhouse gases there is already too much heat in the oceans to stop a lot of impacts — like the melting of a huge amount of Antarctic ice.
There’s the potential that we’re locked into long term sea level rise for a long time.”