Wind turbine maker EWT has signed a contract with Antarctica New Zealand to supply and install three DW54X-1MW turbines. They each have a rotor diameter of 54 meters (177 feet) and a hub height of 40 meters (131 feet).
New Zealand’s Scott Base and the US’s McMurdo Station are both on Ross Island, in the Ross Sea – the southern extension of the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Victoria Land. They’re a few miles apart from each other, and the three turbines will be installed halfway between the two at Crater Hill. (Ross Island is formed by four volcanoes.) The turbines will be connected to a microgrid that provides electricity to both stations; Scott Base is undergoing a redevelopment, which is expected to be completed in 2028.
The wind turbines are part of an extensive upgrade program, including the replacement of three existing smaller and less powerful 300 kW turbines, the replacement of the existing flywheel storage system with a large battery storage system, an upgrade of the high voltage network, and the replacement of the Scott Base’s diesel generators.
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The inexorable rise of ocean heat is now evident off the coast of West Antarctica, potentially disrupting critical parts of the global climate system and accelerating sea level rise.
An iceberg is calving from Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf in February 2021. Credit: Gallo Images/Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021
Research scientists on ships along Antarctica’s west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage—extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average.
Despite “that extraordinary change, what we’ve seen this year is dramatic,” said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program.
“Even as somebody who’s been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw,” he said. “We don’t know how long this is going to last. We don’t fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave.”
If such conditions recur in the coming years, it could start a rapid destabilization of Antarctica’s critical underpinnings of the global climate system, including ice shelves, glaciers, coastal ecosystems, and even ocean currents. Such radical changes have already been sweeping the Arctic, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s.
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A massive iceberg broke off Antarctica on Saturday, the latest piece of ice to leave the continent.
The U.S. National Ice Center measured the iceberg at 71.5 square miles, about three times the size of Manhattan. Previous media reports had the iceberg at over 100 square miles.
The iceberg is now in the Amundsen Sea but will eventually drift into Pine Island Bay, notes the Ice Center. The iceberg shows signs of fracturing, meaning smaller pieces of ice may break off. The Ice Center said it’s not expected to cause any shipping hazards.
Chris Shuman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said the break is part of a natural process, but the frequency of the breaks is concerning. Forces such as wind, tides, currents and even collisions with other icebergs can create rifts in the ice. Warm water moving underneath the glaciers causes the ice to thin and perhaps accelerates the rifts.
“The fact that the calving events have gotten a little more frequent is not a good sign,” Shuman said. He adds there is no sign the trend is reversing.
The continuation, he said, means further ice losses to Antarctica and possible rising sea levels as a result.
The glacier, reports the Washington Postis a part of West Antarctica that already loses 45 billion tons of ice annually, contributing to sea level rises. Pine Island Glacier, Gizmodo reports, is the “fastest-melting glacier in Antarctica.”
Aerial photograph of the first U.S. portable nuclear reactor facility near Sundance in the 1960s. (Courtesy Crook County Museum)
Editor’s note: Here’s an intereting story from a newspapaer with a most intereting name for we East Coast folk. Expect to see more of their stories here in the future.
A small modular reactor demonstration project in Kemmerer has people in Wyoming excited for a nuclear future, but the Cowboy State has a little-known nuclear past.
Wyoming was home to the first portable land-based nuclear power plant in the United States from 1962-1968, which was transported by air and built near Sundance. It provided 1.25 megawatts of power for three large radar domes at the now-defunct Sundance Air Force Station, which helped keep America safe from Communism.
“It was during the Cold War, so they watched for missiles,” Rocky Courchaine, director of the Crook County Museum, told Cowboy State Daily.
The museum maintains an exhibit on the historic site of the first experimental nuclear reactor in the U.S.
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The reactor, known as PM-1, was part of the Army Nuclear Power Program. The idea was to have small reactors that could be deployed at remote sites that needed heat and electricity.
The program developed a number of different small reactor designs, which were deployed at various remote locations, including Antarctica and Alaska.
The location of the Wyoming reactor is remote today, but in 1962 when the reactor went online, it was largely wilderness.
And in the early 1960s, “portable” wasn’t exactly a briefcase or backpack.
The reactor was assembled from 16 packages the size of shipping containers. They weighed about 30,000 pounds each.
These containers were flown in by C-130 aircraft to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. From there, they were trucked to the Sundance Air Force Station about 10 miles north of Sundance on Warren Peak.
The station was part of the Air Defense Command and fed radar data to the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.
It was the era of the Cold War, and America was watching the Soviets closely.
The radar installation on Warren Peak provided data that could be analyzed to determine if missiles were heading for America, or if detected planes were friendly or commies.
New Jersey coastal properties are experiencing more floodingincluding from accelerating sea level rise. Battery City in lower Manhattan is constructing $4 billion in protections to prevent a repeat of Hurricane Sandy which forced the closure of buildings for months, with tenants fleeing to higher ground. Massachusetts issued about $4 billion in sea level rise flooding protection bonds, Miami Beach and Miami about $1 billion, and San Francisco about $4 billion.
Massive Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting at a recordpace adding to the costs with the largest global contributor to sea level rise Thwaites in Antarctica about to collapse as documented by NASA JPL with 25 years of ice-penetrating aerial imagery. Subsurface ocean waters 3.6ºF above freezing at Thwaite’s base caused “explosive and disturbing” melt as described by NASA, identifying protections from 2’ minimum of sea level rise flooding by 2030 to preserve commerce and national security as published by 26 news entities: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2022/06/16/upgrading-our-building-standards-for-flooding-from-sea-level-rise-will-let-us-finance-resilient-construction-with-private-sector-green-bonds/
Architects and engineers are in a bind with their insurers’ resilience policies requiring the design of structures to the 2’ minimum of protections by 2030 even if their clients can’t pay –– an untenable position since just one lawsuit can bankrupt any design firm.
Fortunately, New Jersey’s calculated $90 billion in protection costs are available and ready to deploy. The Investor Network on Climate Risk has over $47 trillion of such assets with a priority for green affordable housing. Using his valuable private capital markets experience, Governor Phil Murphy is evaluating a proposal to deploy these funds for New Jersey. Familiar with the proposal, NJ State Senator Bob Smith said “we need to thoroughly explore potentially viable private sector means before resorting to taxpayer financing, but most importantly, we need to stimulate and protect New Jersey’s economy.”
New Jersey experts in real estate finance and environmental protection are being enlisted to help deploy the financing, and are participating in the Sept. 29, 2022, national resilience standard public meeting. Additional experts may participate by writing mts@sustainableproducts.com.
The authors are environmental attorneys Mike Italiano and Brian Davis affiliated with the nonprofit Capital Markets Partnership. They have over 60 years of combined litigation and regulatory experience with federal, State, and local government, companies, and private practice.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which hold enough frozen water to lift oceans 65 metres, are tracking the UN’s worst-case scenarios for sea level rise, researchers said Monday, highlighting flaws in current climate change
Mass loss from 2007 to 2017 due to melt-water and crumbling ice aligned almost perfectly with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change’s (IPCC) most extreme forecasts, which see the two ice sheets adding up to 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) to global oceans by 2100, they reported in Nature Climate Change.
Such an increase would have a devastating impact worldwide, increasing the destructive power of storm surges and exposing coastal regions home to hundreds of millions of people to repeated and severe flooding.
That is nearly three times more than mid-range projections from the IPCC’s last major Assessment Report in 2014, which predicts a 70-centimetre rise in sea level from all sources, including mountain glaciers and the expansion of ocean water as it warms.
Despite this clear mismatch between the observed reality of accelerating ice sheet disintegration and the models tracking those trends, a special IPCC report last year on the planet’s frozen regions maintained the same end-of-century projections for Greenland, and allowed for only a small increase from Antarctica under the highest greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
“We need to come up with a new worst-case scenario for the ice sheets because they are already melting at a rate in line with our current one,” lead author Thomas Slater, a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, told AFP.
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The climate science community is mourning the loss of a pioneering climate scientist and glaciologist, Konrad Steffen. Koni, as he was known to his friends and colleagues, apparently fell to his death in a deep opening in the ice called a crevasse on Saturday while doing research in Western Greenland.
BY JEFF BERARDELLI, CBS NEWS
Konrad “Koni” Steffen, a leading climate scientist who documented melting ice sheets, at the Swiss Camp research site in Greenland in 2007. REUTERS
With nearly 15,000 academic citations to his name, Steffen, who was 68 years old, dedicated his life to studying the rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Ironically, it was the perils created by melting around Swiss Camp in Greenland — a research outpost he founded in 1990 — that claimed his life.
Jason Box, a well-known ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, had spent many years working alongside Steffen and was with him right before he disappeared.
Box says the snowy, windy weather at the time was disorienting. He says Steffen “ultimately went beyond the safety perimeter in low visibility, windy conditions. Koni fell into a water based crevasse while the rest of us were working nearby, unaware. The last thing he said to us was he was going to look at data.”
The team organized a lengthy search and eventually found evidence in the thin ice. “[We] found a 2.5 meter long busted through hole in the 3 cm thick floor of the crevasse 8 meters down,” Box wrote in a message thread on Twitter. “I am told one is not buoyant in such cold freshwater. Since he was not found, I think he remains 8 meters down in the water.”
Emissions from human activity like the burning of fossil fuels may have been sharply underestimated. Photo Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
Oil and gas production may be responsible for a far larger share of the soaring levels of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the earth’s atmosphere than previously thought, new research has found.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, add urgency to efforts to rein in methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, which routinely leaks or intentionally releases the gas into air.
“We’ve identified a gigantic discrepancy that shows the industry needs to, at the very least, improve their monitoring,” said Benjamin Hmiel, a researcher at the University of Rochester and the study’s lead author. “If these emissions are truly coming from oil, gas extraction, production use, the industry isn’t even reporting or seeing that right now.”
Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled from preindustrial times. A New York Times investigation into “super emitter” sites last year revealed vast quantities of methane being released from oil wells and other energy facilities instead of being captured.
The extent to which fossil fuel emissions, as opposed to natural sources, are responsible for the rising methane levels has long been a matter of scientific debate. Methane seeps from the ocean bed, for instance, and also spews from land formations called mud volcanoes.
To shed light on the mystery, researchers at Rochester’s Department of Earth and Environmental Studies examined ice cores from Greenland, as well as data from Antarctica stretching back to about 1750, before the industrial revolution.
They found that methane emissions from natural phenomena were far smaller than estimates used to calculate global emissions. That means fossil-fuel emissions from human activity — namely the production and burning of fossil fuels — were underestimated by 25 to 40 percent, the researchers said.
The scientists were helped in their analysis by different isotopes found in methane emissions from natural sources, compared to emissions from the production of fossil fuels. Isotopes are versions of an element that have very slight differences, allowing the researchers to differentiate between them.
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A decade of ice, ocean and atmospheric studies found systems nearing dangerous tipping points. As the evidence mounted, countries worldwide began to see the risk.
BY BOB BERWYN, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS
DEC 28, 2019
The 2010s may go down in environmental history as the decade when the fingerprints of climate change became evident in extreme weather events, from heat waves to destructive storms, and climate tipping points once thought to be far off were found to be much closer.
It was the decade when governments worldwide woke up to the risk and signed the Paris climate agreement, yet still failed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions at the pace and scale needed. And when climate scientists, seeing the evidence before them, cast away their reluctance to publicly advocate for action.
The sum of the decade’s climate science research, compiled in a series of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests global warming is pushing many planetary systems toward a breakdown.
New studies showed polar ice caps melting and sea level rising much faster than just 10 years ago. Ocean researchers showed how marine heat waves kill corals and force fish to move northward, affecting food supplies for millions of people in developing countries. They tracked changes to crucial ocean currents and concluded that hurricanes will intensify faster in a warming world.
Together, the research showed how important it will be to cap the global temperature rise as far below 2 degrees Celsius—the Paris Agreement goal—as possible.
Feedback Loops on the Greenland Ice Sheet
At the start of the decade, it was unclear how fast the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets would melt. As recently as the 1990s, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet was balanced by the buildup of new snow and ice, offering some hope that sea-level rise would be slow, allowing coastal communities time to adapt.
By the end of 2019, a study published in the scientific journal Nature showed the Greenland Ice Sheet was melting seven times faster than it had been in the 1990s. That’s on pace with the IPCC’s worst-case climate scenario, with Greenland alone contributing 2 to 5 inches of sea level rise by 2100. Another study, looking at evidence in fossilized shells, showed temperatures are very near a threshold that will melt most of the ice sheet.
Scientists discovered feedback loops and new ways earth’s systems interact to melt the ice. Global warming is expanding ice slabs beneath Greenland’s snowy areas, hastening runoff and sea level rise. In Antarctica, they showed how global warming is shiftingwinds and pushing warmer water under floating ice shelves—both of which could contribute to rapid disintegration of ice shelves with a subsequent surge of sea level rise.
“The rate and magnitude of Greenland Ice Sheet mass loss, and of ice loss globally, has been dramatic,” said Twila Moon, a climate researcher with the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
How Sea Ice Loss Influences the Atmosphere
Many studies in the second half of the decade showed how important it is to keep the global temperature rise as far below 2 degrees Celsius as possible to avoid triggering tipping points that would have cascading consequences. Arctic sea ice is one of the big concerns.
Even now, in its diminished state, the summer Arctic sea ice is a 1.6 million square-mile shield that reflects incoming solar radiation back to space. The more it melts, the more darker-colored ocean can absorb heat, speeding up the planet’s overall warming.
At 2 degrees Celsius warming, Arctic Ocean sea ice will probably melt completely, said National Snow and Ice Data Center climate researcher Walt Meier. “Some ice probably will persist if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Meier said. He noted that research has suggested the ice could recover fairly quickly—if greenhouse gas concentrations are reduced enough to drop the temperature.
One intriguing question has been how the loss of Arctic sea ice will affect weather patterns in North America, Europe and Asia.
Melting that much of Earth’s icebox could alter wind patterns that shunt weather systems around the Northern Hemisphere, scientists reasoned early in the decade. A study in 2012 suggested a mechanism: Sea ice melt alters the jet stream by reducing the temperature contrast between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes. As the jet stream weakens, it enables areas of rainy weather or hot, dry conditions to linger longer over a given area, leading to extreme rainfall or heat waves and drought.
As the decade ended, studies seemed to support that early conclusion. Research published by Michael Mann, Stefan Rahmstorf and others showed how heat waves, floods and wildfires are linked with a jet stream pattern that, in turn, is related to an over-heated Arctic. In a climate warmed by greenhouse gases, the jet stream is more likely to set up in a pattern that causes extremes to linger longer over Europe and North America.
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More unsettling news from the bottom of the world.
Almost one-quarter of the ice in the West Antarctic ice sheet has been classified as “unstable,” according to a new study released this week.
This is due to the huge volume of ice that’s melted from the ice sheet over the past 25 years. Some areas are losing ice five times faster than they were in the early 1990s.
The ice has thinned by some 400 feet in some places, the study said. The ice sheet and its glaciers are melting from underneath as warming sea water – overheated due to man-made climate change – chews away at it from below.
This map shows changes to the Antarctic ice sheet’s thickness from 1992 to 2017. Ice loss is in red while ice gained is in blue. (Photo: Shepherd et al 2019/Geophysical Research Letters/AGU.)
“Along an 1,850-mile stretch of West Antarctica, the water in front of the glaciers is too hot,” Shepherd told the Guardian. “This causes melting of the underside of the glaciers where they grind against the seabed. The melting lessens the friction and allows the glaciers then to slide more quickly into the ocean and therefore become thinner.”
A reminder: This isn’t the floating sea ice around Antarctica, which melts and refreezes with the seasons. This is freshwater ice on the gigantic ice sheets and in the glaciers that cover most of the continent.
