28 de abril de 2008

Gronelândia: o comportamento do gelo



Mais sobre o comportamento do gelo na Gronelândia. Vejam a figura acima. A figura e a informação vêm na nota Climate Feedback: Losing Greenland. Um excerto:
"...the American Geophysical Union meeting last December, ... session after session presented new data about the extent of summer melt in Greenland. Information from the GRACE satellites shows that the overall mass balance of the ice sheet is dropping steadily, and although surface melt varies quite a bit from summer to summer, two of the last three years have seen record levels of melt.
“2007 was a shocking year,” Scott Luthcke, who works with GRACE at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told me later. One record melt season does not spell the end of Greenland, of course, and journalists must always be wary about sounding too alarmist based on short-term records. But overall, the outlook for Greenland is simply not good: Changes in speeds of the island’s outlet glaciers show that, no matter whether they are advancing or retreating, they are far faster at changing their behavior than anyone had thought before."

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