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The State of the Cryosphere Dr Chris Fogwill THE STATE OF THE CRYOSPHERE Module Outline Ice, in all its forms, plays a critical role in the Earth’s Climate System from the equator to the Polar Regions. Recent observations point to rapid, possibly irreversible changes in the cryosphere which may lead to catastrophic changes for atmospheric, oceanographic and biological systems, regionally and globally. This course aims to examine the major issues within this diverse research area from a geographical perspective, and themes tackled will range from disappearing snow and ice and lessons from climates past, to Polar ecosystem adaptation and Polar societies in a changing world. This material is suitable for both B.Sc. and B.A. Geography students and aims to tackle some of the major issues which have been highlighted by governments, the media and an ever more vociferous and well informed public! Learning Program The support material for this course consists of the following five key themes or sections: Section Topic 1. Introduction: The State of The Cryosphere A basic introduction to key concepts Trapped in the Ice: The Tara and the Fram Perspectives on Arctic Sea Ice monitoring The Greenland Ice Sheet: The runaway ice sheet! Non-linear ice sheet response to climate? The Antarctic Peninsula: A canary in a coal mine? Catastrophic ice shelf collapses The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Why worry? The threat posed by a unique Ice Sheet? 2. 3. 4. 5. Although each theme stands alone there are similar themes that run throughout each section, particularly the focus on how recent cryospheric changes have been monitored using techniques such as remote sensing. The material in each section acts as a primer for the associated reading list outlined below. It provides a starting point to help you assess this exciting and rapidly developing branch of Earth Sciences. Hopefully it will help to motivate, whilst the reading associated will educate. There are several questions for you to think about in each section that will hopefully be easily answered by most students with a basic science back ground. However they are designed to make you think about important issues and basic concepts that are critical to this subject. THE STATE OF THE CRYOSPHERE Guide to reading 1. Introduction: The State of The Cryosphere As general reading the following books provide great introductions to some of the key concepts of this course: Knight, P.G. (1999). Glaciers. Routledge Sugden, D.E. (1982). Arctic and Antarctic: a modern geographical synthesis. Oxford Blackwell Hanson, J.D. and Gordon, J.E. (1998). Antarctic Environments and Resources: A geographical perspective. Pearson Education. O’Hare, G., Sweeney and Wilby, R. (2005). Weather, Climate and Climate Change: Human Perspectives. Pearson Education. Turney, C. (2008) Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Also the following chapters of the IPPC report AR4 provide important and up to date information on this subject: Lemke, P., J. Ren, R.B. Alley, I. Allison, J. Carrasco, G. Flato, Y. Fujii, G. Kaser, P. Mote, R.H. Thomas and T. Zhang, 2007: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Bindoff, N.L., J. Willebrand, V. Artale, A, Cazenave, J. Gregory, S. Gulev, K. Hanawa, C. Le Quéré, S. Levitus, Y. Nojiri, C.K. Shum, L.D.Talley and A. Unnikrishnan, 2007: Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Jansen, E., J. Overpeck, K.R. Briffa, J.-C. Duplessy, F. Joos, V. MassonDelmotte, D. Olago, B. Otto-Bliesner, W.R. Peltier, S. Rahmstorf. R. Ramesh, D. Raynaud, D. Rind, O. Solomina, R. Villalba and D. Zhang, 2007: Palaeoclimate. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. THE STATE OF THE CRYOSPHERE Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. The following papers provide a starting point for both the lectures and your Seminars. 2. Trapped in the Ice: The Tara and the Fram Sugden, D.E. (1982). Arctic and Antarctic: a modern geographical synthesis. Oxford Blackwell Schiermeier, Q. (2007) The new state of The Arctic. Nature. Vol. 446. 133-135 Bamber, J.L., W. Krabill, V. Raper, and J. Dowdeswell, 2004: Anomalous recent growth of part of a large Arctic ice cap: Austfonna, Svalbard. Geophys. Res. Lett., 31(12). Armstrong, R.L. and M.J. Brodzik, 2001: Recent Northern Hemisphere snow extent: A comparison of data derived from visible and microwave satellite sensors. Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 3673–3676. Shy, T.L., and J.E. Walsh, 1996: North Pole ice thickness and association with ice motion history. Geophys. Res. Lett., 23(21), 2975–2978. Bamber, J.L., W. Krabill, V. Raper, and J. Dowdeswell, 2004: Anomalous recent growth of part of a large Arctic ice cap: Austfonna, Svalbard. Geophys. Res. Lett., 31(12). Armstrong, R.L. and M.J. Brodzik, 2001: Recent Northern Hemisphere snow extent: A comparison of data derived from visible and microwave satellite sensors. Geophys. Res. Lett., 28, 3673–3676. Dumas, J.A., G.M. Flato, and A.J. Weaver, 2003: The impact of varying atmospheric forcing on the thickness of arctic multi-year sea ice. Geophys. Res. Lett., 30(18), 1918–1921. Exploring Arctic Transpolar Drift During Dramatic Sea Ice Retreat Eos TRANSACTIONS, AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION, VOLUME 89 NUMBER 3, 2008, P 21–28. (Available On-line at http://epic.awi.de/Publications/Gas2008a.pdf) Serreze, M.C. et al. Perspectives on the Arctic's Shrinking Sea Ice Cover. Science 315, 1533 (2007). Serreze, MC, JA Maslanik, TA Scambos, F. Fetterer, J. Stroeve, K. Knowles, C. Fowler, S. Drobot, RG Barry, and TM Haran (2003), A record minimum arctic sea ice extent and area in 2002, Geophysical Research Letters, Volume 30, Issue 3 A good web site is that of the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC), to evaluate and synthesize knowledge on climate variability, climate change: http://www.acia.uaf.edu/ 3. The Greenland Ice Sheet: Non-linear dynamics and The Zwally Effect! Truffer, M. and Fahnestock M. Rethinking Ice Sheet Time Scales, Science. Vol 315, 1508-1510. THE STATE OF THE CRYOSPHERE Joughin, I., W. Abdalati, and M. Fahnestock, 2004: Large fluctuations in speed on Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier. Nature, 432, 608–610. Zwally, H.J., et al., 2002: Surface melt-induced acceleration of Greenland ice-sheet flow. Science, 297(5579), 218–222. Zwally, H.J., et al., 2006: Mass changes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and shelves and contributions to sea level rise: 1992-2002. J. Glaciol., 51, 509–527. Rignot, E., and R.H. Thomas, 2002: Mass balance of polar ice sheets. Science, 297(5586), 1502–1506. Rignot, E., and P. Kanagaratnam, 2006: Changes in the velocity structure of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Science, 311, 986–990. Alley, R.B., P.U. Clark, P. Huybrechts, and Joughin, I. 2005: Ice-sheet and sea-level changes. Science, 310, 456–460. Howat, I. M., I. Joughin, S. Tulaczyk, and S. Gogineni (2005). Rapid retreat and acceleration of Helheim Glacier, east Greenland. Geophysical Research Letters, 32, Charbit, S., D. Paillard, and G. Ramstein (2008), Amount of CO2 emissions irreversibly leading to the total melting of Greenland, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35. A good web site on this topic is that of the GLIMPSE Project lead by Prof. Tavi Murray at the University of Swansea: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/glimpse/ 4. The Antarctic Peninsula, A canary in a coal mine? Hanson, J.D. and Gordon, J.E. (1998). Antarctic Environments and Resources: A geographical perspective. Pearson Education. Antarctic Peninsula climate variability: historical and paleoenvironmental perspective. Domack, Eugene. American Geophysical Union, 2003. Scambos, T., C. Hulbe, M. Fahnestock, and J. Bohlander, 2000: The link between climate warming and break-up of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula. J. Glaciol., 46, 516–530. Domack, E. et al. (2005) Stability of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula during the Holocene epoch. Nature, 436, 681-685. Vaughan, D.G., et al., 2001: Climate change – Devil in the detail. Science, 293(5536), 1777–1779. Vaughan, D.G., et al., 2003: Recent rapid regional climate warming on the Antarctic Peninsula. Clim. Change, 60, 243–274. Shepherd, A., D. Wingham, T. Payne, and P. Skvarca, 2003: Larsen Ice Shelf has progressively thinned. Science, 302, 856–859. 5. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Why worry? The West Antarctic Ice Sheet: behavior and environment Alley, Richard B. American Geophysical Union, 2000. THE STATE OF THE CRYOSPHERE Shepherd, A., D.J. Wingham, and J.A.D. Mansley, 2002: Inland thinning of the Amundsen Sea sector, West Antarctica. Geophys. Res. Lett., 29 (10), 1364. Shepherd, A., D. Wingham, and E. Rignot, 2004: Warm ocean is eroding West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Geophys. Res. Lett., 31(23), 1–4. Fricker, H.M. et al. (2007); An Active Subglacial Water System in West Antarctica Mapped from Space Science 315, 1544 Wingham, D. Shepherd, A. Muir and Marshall. Mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2006) 364 (Available on-line at http://www.cpom.org/research/djw-ptrsa364.pdf) Shepherd, A. and Wingham .D. (2007); Recent Sea-Level Contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets Science 315, 1529 Seminar Ideas The design of this course is such that you will develop the knowledge and skills to communicate many of the key concepts covered to an educated but non-specialised audience. Ideally this can be done in groups of three and will therefore be required to read the papers individually before discussing the work as a group and developing your presentations. You should aim to introduce the topic to a non-specialised audience, and it should be between 20-30 minutes in length. The aim is to introduce the topic and describe the key discussions, techniques and/ or findings from one of the key areas covered. Topic 1 ‘What is Sea Ice, and why is it important?’ Topic 2 ‘Are all glaciers in the world receding?’ Topic 3 ‘Is Atlantic thermohaline circulation changing due to disappearing glaciers?’ Topic 4 ‘How can we monitor Sea Ice Changes through time’ Topic 5 ‘Will the Arctic be ice free by 2013?’ Topic 6 ‘What do glaciers and ice sheets contribute to sea level rise?” Topic 7 ‘Climate change and permafrost: what are the implications?’ Topic 8 ’Is there really less snow than there used to be?’ Topic 9 ‘How can we measure the ‘health’ of glaciers worldwide?’ Topic 10 ‘Are all the glaciers in the world shrinking?’ Topic 11 ‘Helhiem, a hotspot of change in the Greenland Ice Sheet.’ Topic 12 ‘The Zwally effect…what’s that about?’ Topic 13 ‘Why are all the Ice Shelves collapsing?’ Topic 14 ‘How do we monitor ice sheets and ice shelves?’ Topic 15 ‘Pine Island Glacier, the beginning of the end for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet?’ Seminar Guidelines As mentioned, each group should present a twenty minute presentation on their title. All of the key references are included in the guide to reading section, but this is a starting point and you are expected to research your topic within your group. During your presentation as well as an accessible introduction and the ‘facts’ from the key articles, please try and include research opinions and discussions from the various web forums on these topics, which have some interesting and often quite disturbing views on these subjects! The presentation should be based around a power point presentation in which each member of the group should contribute to. This will be uploaded at the start of each session. Each member of the group is expected to talk during the presentation!