Since I told Shaun that the Greenland ice was melting at a gew feet a year,
new information has been reported. See below;

Cheers, Alastair.

BTW. On the BBC web page there is a link to a short video which can be played
through RealPlayer. It ends with a cheerful Greenlander looking forward to an
ice free future, but he does remark it might not be so good for us :-(


----- Original Message -----
From: "Dano"
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Sent: Tuesday, August 03, 2004 6:48 PM
Subject: Greenland ice-melt 'speeding up'


BBC article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3922579.stm

"Now, amid some of the most hostile conditions anywhere on the planet,
Carl Boggild and his team have recorded falls as dramatic as 10 metres
a year - in places the ice is dropping at a rate of one metre a
month...Dr Boggild and his colleagues, studying the physics of how the
air and ice relate, conclude that as much as 55% of the melting is
attributable to warming in the air.

He is cautious to avoid blaming climate change too readily: "Maybe if
we look back after 50 years and see how temperatures have risen, then
we can call it climate change...

Dr Boggild is all too aware of how easily he could be accused of
jumping onto a climate change bandwagon.

But he is adamant that the results he has gathered so far are
reliable.

Potatoes are growing for the first time in centuries

"We can say for certain that the rate of melting has increased and we
can say for certain that the height of the ice-sheet is falling, even
allowing for increased ice-flow. "

Scholarly article:


http://www.geus.dk/departments/quate...ubl_2004_1.pdf

Towards an assessment of the balance state of the Greenland Ice Sheet

D