The melting may not be caused by man-made global warming, but why is there so much denial about the melting?
Extreme Ice http://www.npr.org/b...xtreme_ice.html
Once a climate change skeptic, Balog here presents stirring time-lapse images of melting bodies of ice. By placing cameras throughout the Arctic and programming them to shoot one frame every daylight hour for three years, he and his team were able to capture unprecedented footage of the world in flux.
The gathered evidence points to extreme melting in polar regions. But it also suggests that the effects of climate change are occurring at a much more accelerated rate than previously thought. Extreme Ice explores the potential implications of this undeniable "big melt."
Glacier Bay Park's Gravity Shifts As Ice Melts http://www.npr.org/t...toryId=91894873
When English explorer George Vancouver visited southeast Alaska in 1794, the fjord we think of today as Glacier Bay was the site of a giant sheet of ice, more than 60 miles long. There was no bay — just ice.
But over the next two centuries, something astounding happened: The ice melted, and fast.
(While this is the fastest glacial retreat ever documented, it's not thought to be caused by man-made global warming.)
All that ice was very heavy; it had been pressing down on the Earth's crust like a bowling ball on a bed. So when it disappeared, the bed — the Earth's crust — sprang back up. And it's still springing up. That's isostatic uplift.
Nowhere is the phenomenon more pronounced than Russell Island, farther up Glacier Bay. About 200 years ago, the island sat under thousands of feet of ice; now it's covered with brush and trees.
Edited by risktaker, 01 May 2009 - 03:58 PM.