Amazing Sounds When You Drop Ice Down A 450-Foot Hole. Also, Swimming In Antarctica

Some wild sounds when this chunk of ice was dropped down
a 450-foot hole in the ice down in Antarctica 

Scientists in Antarctica drill deep holes in the ice fields and glaciers of Antarctica, trying to discover clues about climate and the atmosphere tens or even hundreds of thousands of years in the past.

Popular Mechanics perfectly describes the sound you'll hear in the video. (I confess I thought of Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes, too).

According to Popular Mechanics:

"Princeton University geochemist John Andrew Higgins shared the video, which stars someone's hands only as they drop a chunk of ice down a 450-foot bore hole. The sound begins to bounce in layers, equal parts space laser and Old West shootout from a Bugs Bunny Cartoon."

A lot of the sounds you'll hear in the video below has to do with the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect the reason car horns sound like they're falling in pitch as you drive past them.

Says Popular Mechanics:

"'The first thing you hear as is the ice falling is the pitch of the sound changing,' (Researcher Peter) Neff explains in the video. 'That's the Doppler effect. Then when the ice hits the bottom of the bore hole, the sound doesn't only come straight up - the sound waves start to bounce off the sides of the hole. That's why you hear the plink! with sort of a heartbeat sound afterwards.'"

The scientists are taking ice core samples and finding some at the bottom that can be up to 800,000 years old. Air bubbles trapped in that ancient ice can give clues as to what the Earth's atmosphere was like eons ago, and how the chemistry of the air has changed over that time.

Here's the video. It replays several times so you can hear it over and over again.  Definitely turn the sound up, but headphones please if you are at work, out in public, etc.  You will want to hear it again and again. I know I did:



In a somewhat related development, an endurance swimmer recently decided to put on his Speedos and swim in a pocket of water around some Antarctic ice, to raise awareness of climate change.

Besides the activism, the videographer captures some really cool colors and hues in Antarctic ice and water.

Here's his video:

A Balmy Part Of Antarctica Is Scaring People Worried About Climate Change

Esperanza Base, Antarctica just recorded the icy continent's hottest
temperature on record - 65 degrees. Photo via NBC News
by Vanderlei Almeda/AFP and Getty Images

A temperature of 65 degrees isn't all that hot.  It's nice, sure, but nothing extreme.

Unless you're in Antarctica.

Last week, a research center and weather station called Esperanza Base  on the northern edge of Antarctica's Trinity Peninsula got up to 64.9 degrees, which is the hottest temperature on record in that frigid continent at the bottom of the world.

The old record for Antarctica was 63.5 degrees on March 24, 2015.

True, the Trinity Peninsula is the toastiest part of Antarctica, jutting north toward South America. It's the area of Antarctica that's furthest away from the South Pole, so it is bound to be warmer than the rest of this icy continent.

Still, the area around the Trinity Peninsula, and much of the area around Antarctica has been warming rapidly in recent decades so this does alarm climate scientists.

"To have a new record set that quickly is surprising - but who knows how long that will last? Possibly not that long at all," James Renwick of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand told The Guardian. 

Some caveats to this Antarctic warm record: The area where this warm temperature was set is prone to balmy  northerly winds coming down the slopes of nearby mountains. So this warm day was surely a natural, normal event, probably made a little more extreme by climate change.

Usually, these warm winds allow temperatures at Esperanza Base to rise to only 50 degrees or so.

The 65-degree record is preliminary and will need to be verified by experts.

Scientists are alarmed by warming around Antarctica because certain glaciers and ice shelves are prone to melting in a warmer world. That would contribute to destructive global sea level rise.

About 87 percent of glaciers along the west coast of Trinity Peninsula have retreated over the past 50 years, and that trend has accelerated over the past dozen years or so, according to the World Meteorological Organization, as reported by NBC News.

Weird Square Iceberg Turns Out To Be Not As Weird As You'd Think

An odd rectangular iceberg recently broke
off the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica.

When you think of icebergs, you probably envision a jagged pile of ice sticking up from the water, with most of the iceberg still lurking underwater, ready to sink another ship like the Titanic.

This universal vision of icebergs is what recently made an Antarctic iceberg newsworthy.  It was a perfect rectangle. Flat on top, with straight vertical sides with sharp corners without any sign of imperfect geometry.  

According to LiveScience, the wonderfully rectangular gigantic piece of ice is called a tabular iceberg. LiveScience interviewed Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA and the University of Maryland.  Here's how she explained it.

Tabular icebergs like this one that made the news are always wide and flat and long, like a sheet cake. They split off from the edges of ice shelves, which are large blocks of ice connected toland but floating in the water surrounding places like Antarctica.  This particular iceberg came from the Larsen C ice shelf.

The Larsen C ice shelf made news last year, too, when an iceberg the size of Delaware broke awau from it. Many scientists saw this and the diminishing Larsen C ice shelf an ominous sign of global warming.

The recent rectangular iceberg isn't nearly as big as that giant Delaware sized one last year, so it isn't by itself much of a concern.

"What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square," Brunt said. Other scientists said it's common to see icebergs with relatively straight edges but it's rare to have a tabular iceberg with two corners at such right angles 

You can see a more typical, smaller, irregularly shaped tabular iceberg to left of the square one in the photo in this post.

Brunt guessed the iceberg was more than a mile across. Like most icebergs of all stripes, the majoritu of this one is hidden beneath the water's surface.

This one had to be newly-formed, she said, because the edges of it hadn't been rounded off by wind, waves and weather.

The top of the iceberg looks like a great place to go cross country skiing or something, but it's better to look at it from a distance. There are probably cracks and crevices opening or about to, and it would be dangerous to stand on this thing.

So, we'll admire it from a distance.

Sea Level Rise Might Be Worse Than We Thought

Water from melting flows off the Greenland
Ice Sheet. Recent research suggests ice
sheet melting in Greenland and
Antarctica might be worse than first thought. 

The science shifts a little from time to time as to how bad sea level rise is going to get with global warming. The latest study is mostly bad news on this front.

The latest salvo in this discussion is a new study that says melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are now speeding up the process.

Global warming causes sea levels to rise in two ways: Warmer water expands. When the water heats up, it gets "bigger" meaning it has nowhere to go but up.

The other way sea levels rise is more obvious: Land based ice sheets melt, and the meltwater eventually makes its way to the oceans. Hence, higher water.

The latest research says the pace of sea level rise has picked up over the past 25 years mostly because of the melting ice sheets.

According to The Weather Channel:

"Of the 3 inches of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from leting ice. But the process is accelerating, and more than three quarters of that acceleration since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland an Antartica, the study shows."

The bottom line is that by the year 2100, sea levels could rise by two feet, instead of the one foot projections we've commonly heard are due by the end of the century.

One big wild card in all this is probably Antarctica. Will big parts of it keep melting faster and faster? Or will increased snowfall over that continent at the bottom of the Earth offset some of the melt. It tends to snow more when it's warmer, as long as it's not above freezing. A warmer Antarctic climate could increase snowfall. On top of that, some sort of natural cycle has increased snowfall in Antarctica over the past 10,000 years.

A NASA study, using satellite analysis, says the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001. That rate slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.

It's possible this net gain trend will reverse itself in coming decades. Plus, everybody knows that parts of Antarctica are indeed showing a melting trend. And other research, including the new work I described above, contradicts the NASA findings.

As you can see, scientists really need to continue figuring out Antarctica and how it relates to climate change.

Meanwhile, things are worse in some areas than others. Changing sea currents and sinking land in some parts of the U.S. East Coast are making things worse. After sinking land amid rising sea levels can never be a good thing.

The combined land sinking and sea level rise means that the sea level in the past 100 years has shown a net gain of 11 inches in New York and Boston, 16 inches in Atlantic City, 18 inches in Norfolk, Virginia and 25 inches in Galveston, Texas.

While some of the research is still a little murky, one thing is clear: It's only going to get worse.

Antarctic Sea Ice Is Having A Rough Year, Too

A mountain near the western coast of Antarctica with a fractured
ice shelf to the left of it on the water. Ice shelves
are deteriorating in Antarctica, and that could mean
more global sea level rises. 

We've been watching the Arctic sea ice extent off and on all year in this here blog thingy because it's been struggling along at record lows, or near record lows most of the time.

That's not good news, of course, because the sea ice up there has been diminishing for decades, thanks in large part to global warming. That ice loss, in turn, might screw up northern hemispheric weather patterns.

For the record, the Arctic sea ice minimum for the season did not set a record low as some people expected, but after a quick start to the re-freeze season up there in September, lots of warm air has pushed into the Arctic in October, so the re-freeze has slowed down to a disconcerting crawl. 

There's a chance, perversely, that the low sea ice extent might be partly responsible for changes in the jet stream that have brought occasionally brutally cold and snowy winters to parts of North America and western Europe.

And now, let's take a look at the Antarctic, where things this year are not going so great, either. Ice extent there is among the lowest on record, which is a switch because the overall trend has been for increased ice extent around the Antarctic in recent decades.

Oh sure, some of the outer ice shelves have been eroding dangerously, but the overall sea ice has expanded somewhat, thanks to atmospheric circulation changes that caused upwelling of colder water around Antarctica that have promoted more easily freezable waters, notes Bob Henson at Weather Underground. 

Also, summertime melt water has increased from the Antarctic continent, reducing the salinity of the ocean water around there, making it easier to freeze.

This year, though, brought another shift in the weather patterns around Antarctica. It might be a one year deal, but it did break down the ice at the bottom of the Earth, that's for sure.

It remains to be seen if this year's low Antarctic ice extent is a one year shot, or the beginning of a trend.

A more worrisome development around Antarctica is the stability of the ice shelves.

Warmer ocean water seems to be chewing up the undersides of ice shelves along the coasts of Antarctica. These ice shelves act as dams that keep glaciers in place, or at least slow them down so they move at, um, a glacial pace down Antarctic slopes.

In the past, there's been basically an equilibrium. Some glacial ice makes it to the ocean and melts, but new ice is manufactured in the cold Antarctic interior, so all was good.

Since the ice shelves are melting more, that opens the door for the glaciers to move faster, going off into the sea and eventually melting.

The ice that comes down from the land and ends up in the ocean to melt is bad, because that contributes to global sea level rises. The new ice manufacturing process in Antarctica's interior can't keep up with the ice loss created by the newly speedy glaciers.

The problem can keep escalating because the more ice at the bottom of the ice shelf melts, the more is exposed to the warmer ocean water, and the melting just rolls on.

Still, the melting might have recently slowed a little bit, at least temporarily. The most intense ice shelf melting in Antarctica seems to have occurred between 2002 and 2009, notes NPR.

Even so, the fear is the melting will continue and the ice shelves in coastal Antarctic waters will collapse entirely, and the glaciers will flow toward the sea in a gallop. A gallop by glacial standards anyway.

That, in turn would accelerate sea level rises.

So yeah, people in toasty Miami and countless other coastal locations ought to care about what's going on in Antarctica. 

Antarctic Hot Spell Gets The Headlines, But The Real Trouble Is In The Ice

Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the
Antarctic Pennisula just recorded what might be
the warmest temperature on record for
Antarctica. But that's not the
real danger in Antarctica if the world warms.
Thawing ice sheets could cause big problems.  

The climate world was abuzz last week with news that Antarctica had its warmest temperature on record.

Readings of 63.5 degrees were reported at Base Esperanza and 63.3 degrees at Marambio, says Christopher Burt at Weather Underground. 

Both weather stations are on the Antarctic Pennisula, which juts north toward the warmer environments of the southern tip of South America.

The standing record for Antarctica was 59 degrees at Vando in 1974, which is definitely closer to the South Pole than the stations that had readings in the 60s last week.

There's no question that the hot temperatures Esperanza and Marambio were highly unusual for Antarctica.

Since records are spotty and don't go back all that far on Antarctica, and not many people are there to monitor the weather there, there's a good possibility it has been hotter than that 63.5 degrees last week.

The bottom line: If you're talking about those warm temperatures in the context of global warming, it's interesting, but doesn't tell you all that much about it.

A little more buried in the headlines, though, was something more ominous, at least in the long term.

Last year we learned that the West Antarctic ice sheet, a huge mass of ice down there, was less stable than originally thought. As warmng ocean water infiltrates underneath it, the ice sheet could eventually collapse, allowing masses of ice on land to flow toward the oceans and melt.

This would raise sea levels substantially around the world, which of course is not a good thing, especially if you live in a coastal city just a few feet above sea level.

Now, we learn the even bigger, gigantic glacier of East Antarctica is also under the same threat of collapse, says the Washington Post. 

Again, warm ocean water is getting beneath the East Antarctica ice sheet, especially the ice shel of the Totten Glacier, thinning it from below.

Says the Washington Post:

"The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It is losing an amount of ice 'equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbor every year,' notes the Australian Antarctic Division."

That's alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet - which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that's a 'conservative lower limit' says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin."

If ice floating on the ocean melts, it's not THAT big a deal in terms of sea level. If ice floating on the ocean melts, it's like an ice cube melting in a glass. The glass doesn't overflow when the ice melts.

But the ice floating on the ocean on the West and East Antartica Ice shelves is holding back masses and masses of ice on land. If the ice shelves melt, the ice from the land moves toward and into the ocean and melts.

That's why the scientists studying this thing are worried about sea levels rising.

Of course, the combined 22 feet of sea level rise from melting the West and East Antartica ice won't happen by, say, Friday. This will go on over decades and centuries, and be a big problem for future generations.  Greenland in the northern hemisphere is melting, too, so that adds to the sea level rise.

The immediate problem is, a little bit of sea level rise can cause big problems.

Gradually, coastal areas will see increased flooding, erosion from storms and salt water intrusion from sea water on fresh water supplies increase. It's already starting to happen. Just ask anyone in Miami, Florida or Virginia Beach/Norfolk, Virginia, for instance, about the increasing number of floods during many high tides.

As is always the case with these types of scientific studies, experts are going to have to do a lot more poking and prodding and questioning and replicating to make sure the conclusions about the East Antarctica ice shelf melting are true.

Nobody has yet physically gotten any equipment into the water beneath the ice shelf to confirm that it's warming as much as they think it is, and the ice is going as fast as they think it is. Instruments and observations do confirm there is a thinning of the ice, but scientists need to refine the measurements more.

Scientists are busily getting on with that work, we're told.