Is Greenland's Ice Cap Actually Thickening?

[Mk]

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1485573.htm

Greenland's icecap has thickened slightly in recent years despite concerns that it is thawing out due to global warming, says an international team of scientists.

A team led by Professor Ola Johannessen, at the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Norway, report their findings online ahead of print publication in the journal Science.

The 3,000-metre thick Greenland icecap is a key concern in debates about climate change because a total melt would raise world sea levels by about 7 metres. And a runaway thaw might slow the Gulf Stream that keeps the North Atlantic region warm.

Glaciers at sea level have been retreating fast because of a warming climate, making many other scientists believe the entire icecap is thinning.

But satellite measurements showed that more snowfall is falling and thickening the icecap, especially at high altitudes, say Johannessen and team.

 

[ComputerGeek]

good for greenland, but as they say, the rest of the Ice is melting.

and go ask any Inuit about the polar ice, they will tell you that in the last 30 years, they have lost the ability to access more and more of their hunting grounds because of the melting ice.

 

[WhiteWolf]

I really think nature can repair itself better then that. Even if all of the polar ice melts, all of the energy that it takes to melt it would be like a big heat sponge and thus lowering temperatures, thus balancing out causing rather cold wnters to follow. Or, suppose that these global warming theories are true, and it continue to have rising temperatures, then the temperatures of all that water would rise, thus causing extreme amounts of evaporation. Then the amounts of clouds would increase and provide a perfect sheild against ultraviolet and infrared rays, thus lowering the temperature, causeing snow to the north and repeating the process over again.

 

[blimkie]

http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm

here is another link referring to the thickening of galciers however i don't know if this is a reliable site, i hvae been searching for more literature on this subject and natural climate changes as well.

 

[dgoodpasture2005]

I really think nature can repair itself better then that. Even if all of the polar ice melts, all of the energy that it takes to melt it would be like a big heat sponge and thus lowering temperatures, thus balancing out causing rather cold wnters to follow. Or, suppose that these global warming theories are true, and it continue to have rising temperatures, then the temperatures of all that water would rise, thus causing extreme amounts of evaporation. Then the amounts of clouds would increase and provide a perfect sheild against ultraviolet and infrared rays, thus lowering the temperature, causeing snow to the north and repeating the process over again.

i like the way you think, you also passed this idea up, but you were right along the same lines. If all the ice on Earth melts, and Earth goes back through a cooling process again. First the water levels will rise a couple hundred feet or so, and when it begins to get extremely cold, the water at the north and south poles will start to freeze at high levels (height) leaving the liquid water around it lower and lower, and freezing thicker and thicker as the water level dropped, this process would last a couple hundred years, until it was thick enough to balance out the weather again, and the ice caps would also be back to normal thickness. We'd only be lacking glaciers. But who knows depending on how it effects the weather, new glaciers may be formed in valleys beacuse of intense weather patterns 'caused by the high amounts of evaporation falling to the ground in the form of rain and snow in the initial heat blast. Really, it'd transform Earths whole geography. Let us not forget that water expands in heat as well, the warmer the Earth gets, the more ice that melts, and the more volume water takes up, not just because of melting, but because of the temperature of the water.

 

[Mk]

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=93165
Here's a related thread, "how much ice is melting?"