Magma activity under Greenland's ice

Same Livescience.com web site, two days apart. First, we look at the "Oh my God, people are killing the screaming earth" and "look at me I am a drama queen scientist" story, a report from  a really poor writer.  Just read the first paragraph out loud and weep for humanity:

Dec 11, 2007:  Ominous Artic Melt...

WASHINGTON (AP)—An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point.[I think this site could use an editor] One even speculated [Oh no!] that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data obtained by The Associated Press.

"The Arctic is screaming,'' said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists [Do you believe this crap] surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.''

So scientists in recent days have been asking themselves these questions: Was the record melt seen all over the Arctic in 2007 a blip amid relentless and steady warming? Or has everything sped up to a new climate cycle that goes beyond the worst case scenarios presented by computer models? [I wonder if the author should have said "All scientists". Frankly, I worry about people who ask themselves questions....]

"The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming,'' said Zwally, who as a teenager hauled coal....    [Oh please. Let me stop this before I bleed out.]

Now for the "Oh, never mind" story: 

Dec 13: Magma May Be Melting Greenland Ice

SAN FRANCISCO—Global warming may not be the only thing melting Greenland. [See the homage that has to be paid to the new religion.] Scientists have found at least one natural magma hotspot under the Arctic island that could be pitching in. [Oh, just a hotspot on the earth under the glacier.]

In recent years, Greenland’s ice has been melting more and flowing faster into the sea—a record amount of ice melted from the frozen mass this summer, according to recently released data—and Earth’s rising temperatures are suspected to be the main culprit.

But clues to a new natural contribution to the melt arose when scientists discovered a thin spot in the Earth’s crust under the northeast corner of the Greenland Ice Sheet where heat from Earth’s insides could seep through, scientists will report here this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

“The behavior of the great ice sheets is an important barometer of global climate change,” said lead scientist Ralph von Frese of Ohio State University. “However, to effectively separate and quantify human impacts on climate change, we must understand the natural impacts too.”

The corner of Greenland where the hotspot was found had no known ice streams, the rivers of ice that run through the main ice sheet and out to sea, until one was discovered in 1991. What exactly caused the stream to form was uncertain.

“Ice streams have to have some reason for being there,” von Frese said, “and it’s pretty surprising to suddenly see one in the middle of the ice sheet.” [Bush did it.]

The newly discovered hotspot, an area where Earth’s crust is thinner, allowing hot magma from Earth's mantle to come closer to the surface, is just below the ice sheet and could have caused it to form, von Frese and his team suggest.

“Where the crust is thicker, things are cooler, and where it’s thinner, things are warmer,” von Frese explained. “And under a big place like Greenland or Antarctica, natural variations in the crust will makes some parts of the ice sheet warmer than others.”

What caused the hotspot to suddenly form is another mystery.

“It could be that there’s a volcano down there,” he said, “but we think it’s probably just the way the heat is being distributed by the rock topography at the base of the ice.”

A bonus note from the NSF in 1997 

FEATURE:
"BAKED ALASKA" MUD VOLCANO
DISCOVERED IN NORTH ATLANTIC

Researchers on a cruise have confirmed that a hot mud volcano on the sea floor between Greenland and Norway is oozing mud, seeping gas and spewing a gas-laden plume of warm water into the North Atlantic. Frozen methane hydrate caps the volcano, whose slopes are inhabited by a new species of tube worm most closely related to a group found in Antarctica.

The rare juxtaposition of heat vents on the sea floor with a frozen methane cap has led Hunter College geophysicist Kathleen Crane, who studied the feature on a cruise last August, to dub it a "baked Alaska" complex. The methane hydrate is a white, ice like solid made up of water and gas that can compress a huge amount of gas within its crystal lattice.

Frozen methane has been found within the ocean floor but rarely, as in this case, atop the floor. Methane should dissolve or oxidize in sea water, so its presence suggests that it must be in constant production, according to Naval Research Laboratory geophysicist Peter Vogt, a chief scientist on the cruise. Another theory, however, is that some of the white features are actually bacterial mats.

On the latest cruise to investigate the site, using the Russian vessel Professor Logachev, scientists supported by the National Science Foundation, Naval Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research and Russian and Norwegian institutions confirmed the existence of the mud volcano, a rare phenomenon in the deep ocean. Located 1250 meters deep, the volcano is about one kilometer in diameter, is encircled by a moat, and has "a gross cowpie shape," according to Vogt. The team, also led by Russian chief scientist Georgy Cherkashev, spotted a similar feature in the area that may be a second volcano.

The flow of heat rising within the volcano (up to one or more watts per square meter) is one of the highest measured in the ocean, apart from the boundaries of tectonic plates or "hot spots" such as Hawaii.

What is generating this heat and setting the gas, fluid, and mud into motion is still a mystery. Vogt suggests that the cause could be the gravitational instability of the marine sediments, which were deposited very rapidly by glaciers; or alternatively, the "dewatering" or extrusion of water by the sediments. Crane, on the other hand, proposes that the volcanism may indicate that an ancient fracture between the Greenland Sea oceanic crust and the Barents Sea continental crust is still active, serving as a crack for heat and fluids to rise up to the seafloor....

CDC: Center for Drug Companies

Quick One Today:

Last month I heard on the radio Jennifer Garner telling us that 36,000 people a year die of influenza in the U.S., so says the Center for Disease Control. This seemed crazy, so I did five minutes of research and read through an article from the British Medical Journal.

As the article is a bit long, so permit me to summarize. The CDC is full of crap.

Here is what we have to deal with when we give power to Big Brother: The Congress has directed the CDC (say, isn't the CDC an executive department?) to push vaccinations, so they run campaigns to scare us into getting shots to fight the invisible flu. Aren't the drug companies brilliant? But wait, there is more.

Congress directed the CDC to buy back any unused vaccine from the manufacturers that has not been bought in the market. Brilliant - the government panics everyone into getting shots for last years' flu and, then, buys back the unused stock.

Can there be a better argument against a federal health plan?

Here is an ABC story on politics at the CDC

Iran blinks

John Batchelor is back on WABC.  He is, by far, the best primary source of  information on the middle east in our media.  For more on JB hit HERE

Sunday night, he had an interview with the author of a book to be published next year called "Chechen Jihad."  Here is some fresh input.

First, in 2006 the Chechnyan fundamentalists planned to kill all the leaders of the G8. They had the plan in place and a truck filled with explosives.  Unfortunately, the Russians found out and five days before the assassination, the Russians killed all but one of the plotters.  They got the last one three months later. 

With this mess about them, like pants around their shoes, the Iranians realized they had gone to far - they being the keystone to all terrorist action in the region. There followed high level negotiations that included the U.S. The Iranians, to make things short, caved, Bodansky reported. They agreed to back down their violence, especially in Iraq. 

The recent NIE estimate was part of the deal.  That is, the surprising announcement was part of the planned thaw - a U.S. admission that Iran may not be so bad, after all. The U.S. has been permitting all manner of contact by Iraq with Iran now and speaking quite warmly of its contacts. Of course, the media and critics never pass beyond the surface. See last item below.

The recent peace meeting in the U.S. was impressive in the glad tidings expressed by all, except for Iraq who didn't show up, at least on the highest level.  They did not show up because Iran told them not to as the Shiite big brother.  Indeed, Iran showed and reported it had wonderful chats with Rice and Bush. The violence continues to decrease and Sadr's militia is moving more to the "middle," which seems to mean peaceful. Sadr is somewhat off to the side looking for a way to become a political power in the new paradigm.

From other sources, Sadr's bad-guy strongmen are being removed, if not killed. The Sadr army is killing many who engages in terrorism (this is from AKI news service).  Sometimes, they turn the bad guys, including two Iranian operatives, just last week, over to the U.S. along with the mines and weapons the bad guys had. 

Next?  Very soon, the author reported, there will be an open rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran.  Buy puts in oil companies, if you want to make a killing. The smart money, an analyst friend tells me, is already on oil dropping fast.

A reason Iran may be interested in working things out, other than having the Russians (and, perhaps the other 7) assassinate its leaders or Israel and the U.S. bombing the crap out of them is their economy is at a tipping point.  It it is just about dead - one of the leading oil producers in the world is now rationing gas. There is no more room to play the trickster.

This day, Sunday, PM Brown announced the war in Iraq is over and the soldiers are coming home as soon as possible. Maybe, this is connected. The Sadr people have been busy in Southern Iraq, taking over, it seems, from the British. 

So, either the occupation is going to settle down or, as one pundit put it, the British are fleeing and have lost to Sadr.  Pundits are not usually sensitive to nuance and the British don't walk away from a fight or peacekeeping effort. 

So, go sell your oil stocks, if this tale makes sense.  The more I think about recent events, the more likely it seems.  If you think about it, why would the U.S. publish its strategic intelligence estimates?  Or, why did Mr. Bush say the analysts do a good job, rather than look to prosecute whoever released the information? 

Critics of the administration complain the Bush crowd have stopped down the flow of information, yet do not question the easy release of this apparently sensitive data that could be used against them. Previously, the administration said it would not release NIEs. People are so excited about the notion of another big intelligence error, that they miss the entire exercise. What we have here is another example of Bush being dumb like a fox. (Oh, or his diabolical staff dictating to him their evil, oil-based plots, if that is your pleasure.)

e.g.: 

Why Was the NIE Released?....Part 2
washingtonmonthly.com Found 6 days ago
WHY WAS THE NIE RELEASED?....PART 2.... Three weeks ago DNI Mike McConnell said flatly that he didn't plan to make public any of the key findings from the upcoming National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program. Today, in a move that took everyone by surprise, the key judgments were released. Why? Earlier today I speculated that it might have been due to congressional pressure. Spencer Ackerman doesn't think so: An aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, says that Rockefeller — the obvious culprit in any Senatorial intelligence push — didn't press McConnell to release the NIE's key judgments.

UN causing atoll to sink

I was reading an article from Irene about how 100,000 people concerned about the spewing of carbon into the atmosphere flew to Bali for a conVacation, when I came across more tales of sinking islands. I did some homework on that, a little below. For now, a quick look at the Bash At Bali from the AP:

...The U.N. estimates 47,000 tons of carbon dioxide and other pollutants will be pumped into the atmosphere during the 12-day conference in Bali, mostly from plane flights but also from waste and electricity used by hotel air conditioners.

If correct, Goodall said, that is equivalent to what a Western city of 1.5 million people, such as Marseilles, France, would emit in a day.

But he believes the real figure will be twice that, more like 100,000 tons, close to what the African country of Chad churns out in a year

Chris Goodall is the author of the book "How to Live a Low-Carbon Life." I don't know how he could possible question the UN's facts about global pollution.

More from AP story leads into the sinking island yarn:

But no one expects concrete results here, with closed-door talks expected to be a battle over language and nuance, including whether emission reductions should be voluntary or mandatory and whether developing nations should have the same restrictions as industrial countries.

"We don't need talk, talk, talk," said Ursula Rakova, 43, of Papua New Guinea's Carteret islands, describing how the rising sea has destroyed once-fertile farmland on her island of Huene and split the land mass in two....

So, no concrete results and more carbon in the air than I will produce for the rest of my life. But, they are our saviors, so they can kill as many as they have to in order to save the world.

The Cateret islands are NE of Australia, the coral sea area, I believe. The story making the rounds about the place is global warming is flooding out a whole civilization on the island of Huene. (It was .6 sq miles of coral on a volcano before the farm land was inundated.)

Knowing that the area is subject to tectonic movement, including subduction, I Googled stuff like "Subduction Huene" or in the Coral Sea, etc. I got back pages of newspaper articles online that were, indeed, the same article repeated that said the folks were the first victims of global warming and the very high tides were washing stuff away. Great headlines are easy when you don't have to worry about your assumptions.

Finally, I found, abandoning the chaos of the media and the obscurity of the geological abstracts (those guys are the worst):

"It has also been suggested that the movement of tectonic plates could be responsible. The islands lie in one of the most complex tectonic areas of the earth. They sit next to a plate convergence zone at the boundary of the Pacific Plate, Indo-Australian Plate, and South Bismark Plate on a subduction zone next to the New Hebrides Trench (Bougainville Trench), where the earth's crust is disappearing. There is an active volcano on Bougainville Island, 86km away.

It should be noted, that the Carteret islands are built entirely on a base of coral that sits atop of an extinct volcanic mount. In the usual course of events, such islands eventually subside simply due to the underlying volcanic rock being worn away and not replenished. The Carteret islands are a classic example of such coral islands in their final stage of existence. Interestingly, Charles Darwin was the first to propose such a system of creation and submergence". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carteret_Islands

The New Britain subduction zone, which is in the area, someplace, finds the plate declining some 6 mm/yr. [3 Gene Units] If you look at the map, above, you can see the poor atoll is right in harms way, vis a vis plate movement (the crunched up sea bottom is the give away.)

So, rather than a rising ocean causing mischief, there are two well-established explanations, having nothing to do with UN scientists, that explains Carteret's plight. Either the island is sinking under its own weight and ocean movement, is heading down with its tectonic plate, or people like attendees in Bali are raising the ocean level by jet travel. Occam's razor might do well, here.

So, I won't argue if you think the sea is rising when land gets wet and the sun rises when it appears over the eastern horizon. Simple science. Oh, the sun rises because the rooster calls it.

I know better, now, than to do further research in this vein as true believers don't listen and think it is OK for 100,000 government and ngo hacks to fly the furthest reaches of the earth, a resort island, in order to tell me how I have to stop farting so often. So, as with all religions, we believe what we believe, until we hate what we believed when we realize we were conned.

That is the next step, the emergence of vocal and angry ex-warmers. This is the cycle of all religions. Amen.

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Charlie: The Karate chimp. The reverse back kicks are astounding.

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Technology is a great thing, no?


Gene