Melting At The South Pole?

Every once in a while some victim of John Cook comes along and claims that sublimation is causing the thickness of the ice to decrease in the coldest regions of Antarctica. Rather than arguing against their silly claims, one picture is worth a thousand words.

This is the South Pole Research Station, buried in ice. The red building at left was five stories above the snow when it was built in the 1970s.

http://www.coolantarctica.com/Bases/South_Pole/south_pole0002.html

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
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7 Responses to Melting At The South Pole?

  1. Andy WeissDC says:

    When you never get remotely close to the freezing point, it is very dificult to melt any ice

    • Let us not completely discount sublimation. Over the course of two years a formerly 2″x3″x3″ ice cube in my freezer lost almost a full ½” in every dimension. That means that the Antarctic (or Antartic, if you’re a real climate scientist) might be losing as much as ¼” of ice per year from sublimation. When an area only gets somewhere between 3″ and 12″ of snow per year, you can see why this is extremely serious. Especially when you consider that before James Hansen invented sublimation in 1988 ice just sat around for billions of years.

  2. Justa Joe says:

    I can just see those 3.5 million climate refugees clamouring to move down there, and why not it looks so inviting. Since they are due to arrive by 2030 preparations are already underway.

  3. Andy WeissDC says:

    We should get together and sell some beachfront property down there.

    • Grumpy Grampy ;) says:

      I already netted 200K from a group of environmentalists for a 20 meter sq house lot 2 blocks from the beach in what is being called Goreville! I told them I was going to import some cuddly polar bears so they could have pets.

  4. gator69 says:

    The building is obviously subsiding. Radiant floor heating must be the culprit.

    • Actually, by my calculations, the Glacial Building Subsidence Adjustment should be somewhere around 2m/yr to offset the fact that ice can’t be getting thicker in a warming World (QED). That means that we probably could be losing at least as much as the possibility of something within an estimated 4 orders of magnitude of 30Gt of ice from Antartica[sic]. It’s worse than we thought!

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