Rain and warmth trigger more melting in Greenland

August 12, 2021

August 15, 2021
NASA : Rain and Warmth Trigger More Melting in Greenland 

From The Guardian by Damina Carrington

Precipitation was so unexpected, scientists had no gauges to measure it, and is stark sign of climate crisis

Rain has fallen on the summit of Greenland’s huge ice cap for the first time on record.Temperatures are normally well below freezing on the 3,216-metre (10,551ft) peak, and the precipitation is a stark sign of the climate crisis.

Scientists at the US National Science Foundation’s summit station saw rain falling throughout 14 August but had no gauges to measure the fall because the precipitation was so unexpected.

Across Greenland, an estimated 7bn tonnes of water was released from the clouds.

The rain fell during an exceptionally hot three days in Greenland when temperatures were 18C higher than average in places.

As a result, melting was seen in most of Greenland, across an area about four times the size of the UK.

The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded it was “unequivocal” that carbon emissions from human activities were heating the planet and causing impacts such as melting ice and rising sea level.

Air temperature change (August 14 vs August 5-11 average, °C)

 

 In May, researchers reported that a significant part of the Greenland ice sheet was nearing a tipping point, after which accelerated melting would become inevitable even if global heating was halted.

Ted Scambos, a scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, which reported the summit rain, told CNN: “What is going on is not simply a warm decade or two in a wandering climate pattern. This is unprecedented. We are crossing thresholds not seen in millennia, and frankly this is not going to change until we adjust what we’re doing to the air.”

Greenland also had a large-scale melting episode in July, making 2021 one of just four years in the past century to see such widespread melting. The other years were 2019, 2012 and 1995.

The rain and melt on 14-16 August came at the latest point in the year a major event has been recorded.

The cause of the July and August melting was the same – warm air being pushed up over Greenland and held there.

These “blocking” events are not uncommon but seem to be becoming more severe, according to scientists.

Global sea level would rise by about 6 metres if all of Greenland’s ice melted, although this would take centuries or millennia to occur.

But the trillions of tonnes lost from Greenland since 1994 is pushing up sea levels and endangering the world’s coastal cities.

Sea level has already risen by 20cm, and the IPCC said the likely range by the end of the century was a further 28-100cm, though it could be 200cm.

Greenland’s ice is melting faster than any time in the past 12,000 years, scientists have estimated, with the ice loss running at a rate of about 1m tonnes a minute in 2019.

Links :

• Reuters : Rain falls at Greenland ice summit for first time on record
• The Guardian : Greenland ice sheet on brink of major tipping point, says study

Which way will paper maps go in the future? Cartographer says they'll still be crucial, even with GPS

Cartographer Anthony Stephens says maps do much more than provide a route for travel.

(ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)

From ABC by Bec Whetham

As a test, Anthony Stephens likes to ask "anybody under 30 years old who lives in the city" to name the suburb directly to the north of where they live.
"It is interesting the answers you get," Mr Stephens said.
"Sometimes we even get the question, 'What is north?'"

Our modern dependency on GPS has certainly challenged the cartographer, who has made and sold paper maps for more than 50 years.
His business, The Map Shop, used to produce Adelaide's street directories.
"We stopped printing those four years ago. You will never see a new Fuller's street directory again," Mr Stephens said.

Anthony Stephens has a map for pretty much anywhere.

(ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)

Prior to COVID, 40 per cent of his business was overseas maps.
He has sold 10 in the past nine months.

The message that his product is dying doesn't scare him.
He has heard it before.

First at a map conference in the 1970s, where it was predicted that there would be "no such thing as maps" by 1990.
"And then I attended another conference in San Diego in the 1990s and their message was there would be no maps by the year 2000," Mr Stephens said.
"Guess what? It's 2021 and there are still paper maps and we've got 14,500 different ones."

Making maps for organisations is what keeps The Map Shop going, although its production has decreased.

(ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)

Fortunately the shop has been able to fill some of the gap in demand with an increase in local and domestic maps, alongside its longstanding clients looking for topographical maps for commercial, emergency, or farming purposes.

Why maps are important

More than providing a route to travel or indicating where to find the nearest service station, Mr Stephens says maps are an important factor in human empathy.
"What's the use of listening to the news of doom and gloom if you don't know where the doom and gloom is in relation to you?" Mr Stephens said.
"It's as simple as that."
He has genuine concerns for young people who don't use maps, or know how.
"Because they're so used to looking at the screen on their phone, they only see that portion of the world."

He says maps are also an important record of time.
"[With] everything going online, there is then not a snapshot in time.
We're going to become the forgotten generation."

One of the shop's most popular items is a 100-year-old map of Adelaide, which features things like the Sir Ross Smith landing area.
"Of course all those maps were done under 'plane tabling', which involved a man going on top of a hill … triangulating the major features, then going to another hill and checking the coordinates and then sketching between them."

A modern day cartographer

What Mr Stephens once made by hand is now done with computers.

"We used to be known as plastic scratchers because we would actually work over a light table on a material where you would actually scratch out the plastic to mark out the roads and contours and drainage," Mr Stephens said.
"It still takes the same time to make the maps but the updating is a lot easier for us."

It is online mapping that has allowed modern-day cartographer Alex Broers to develop his love of art, culture and fantasy into a profitable business.

He hand draws "bespoke" maps, recreating Australian destinations that resemble maps of The Lord of the Rings' Middle Earth.
"I was making these maps initially as a personal hobby and passion, it was never a business to begin with," he said.

 

Alex Broers runs Cartography Chronicles, a business that makes old-age maps of Australian destinations.(Supplied: Alex Broers)

Map making an art and a science

In the middle of COVID, Mr Broers started his business Cartography Chronicles in response to commercial interest online.

While it's always preferable to travel to the places he's recreating, the process can be done from his home in Darwin.
"I'm very lucky that we have the internet these days and a lot of the resources that I need to actually make the maps are also online."

It's still a long process though.
"For one of my state maps, it does take me 60-70 hours of drawing and that doesn't factor in the research phase."

While Alex Broers's maps are geographically accurate, they're not recommended for navigational use.
(Supplied: Alex Broers)

While the geographical points are accurate, some features — the mountain ranges in particular — are enlarged.
"Obviously they're not in proportion to real life purely because if they were you'd have a little 'x' on a map or a few contour lines.
"With my work I really wanted to bring to the forefront the geography of each region."
Sentimental attachment

Mr Broers is continually taken aback by the interest in — and emotional attachment to — his work.
"I think it's a real testament that Australians in general are very attached and proud of where they come from," he says.
While Mr Broers's maps may not be made for navigation, they do evoke a personal reference for people.

 

Alex Broers (pictured) and Anthony Stephens are travellers.
Mr Broers grew up in Bahrain and then lived in UK and Oman before moving to Australia.

(Supplied: Alex Broers)

"[They] almost connect the dots for people … [the map] triggers different memories depending on what area you look at."

The future of map making

While Mr Broers's personal style of map making may be keeping the art of cartography alive, Mr Stephens hopes traditional topographical maps will continue into the future.

"[Companies] … like Google rely on that base data so you can have your electronic version.
If that base data is not being developed then your electronic data is going to get out of date as well," Mr Stephens said.
"How can you develop a country if you haven't got up-to-date maps?"

It's a skill Mr Broers appreciates too.
"I don't know many people who are making cartography maps like the likes of Anthony," he said.

Anthony Stephens has moved with the times when it comes to map making.

While GPS is an aid to a map, he says it's not a replacement.(ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)

"I do feel like it's a slowly dying art because of GPS, Google Maps and everything else [but] I still think there's a need for those handmade accurate maps."

The amazing life of sand : deep look

 

There's a story in every grain of sand: tales of life and death, fire and water.
If you scooped up a handful of sand from every beach, you'd have a history of the world sifting through your fingers.
See the unseen at the very edge of our visible world.

How does sand form? Sand can be anything that has been worn down until it’s reduced to some tiny, essential fragment of what it once was: a granite pebble from the mountains; coral from the sea; obsidian from a volcano; even skeletons of microscopic sea animals.
It's also a technical term.
Bigger than sand, that’s gravel, smaller? Silt.

By studying the composition and texture of sand, geologists can reconstruct its incredible life history.
“There’s just a ton of information out there, and all of it is in the sand,” said Mary McGann, a geologist at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA. McGann recently took part in a comprehensive research project mapping sand’s journey into and throughout San Francisco Bay.

Patrick Barnard, another USGS geologist who helped oversee the project, said that it will help scientists understand how local beaches are changing over time.
In particular, Barnard wants to understand why beaches just south of San Francisco Bay are among the most rapidly eroding beaches in the state.

 

From 2010-2012, Barnard and his team sampled beaches, outcrops, rivers and creeks to track sand’s journey around the bay.
They even collected sand from the ocean floor.
The researchers then carefully analyzed the samples to characterize the shapes, sizes, and chemical properties of the sand grains.

Barnard said the information provides a kind of fingerprint, or signature, for each sample that can then be matched to a potential source.
For example, certain minerals may only come from the Sierra Mountains or the Marin Headlands. 

 “If we’ve covered all of the potential sources, and we know the unique signature of the sand from these different sources, and we find it on a beach somewhere, then we basically know where it came from,” explained Barnard.

And those species aren’t the only things finding their way into the sand.
Manmade materials can show up there, too.

McGann has found metal welding scraps and tiny glass spheres (commonly sprinkled on highways to make road stripes reflective) in sand samples from around the bay. 

“All of these things can get washed into our rivers or our creeks, or washed off the road in storm drains,” explained McGann.
“Eventually they end up in, for example, San Francisco Bay.” 

 By piecing together all of these clues – the information found in the minerals, biological material and man made objects that make up sand – the researchers ended up with a pretty clear picture of how sand travels around San Francisco Bay. Some sands stay close to home.
Rocky sand in the Marin Headlands comes from nearby bluffs, never straying far from its source.

Other sands travel hundreds of miles.
Granite from the Sierra Nevada mountains careens down rivers and streams on a century-long sojourn to the coast.

In fact, much of the sand in the Bay Area comes from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, with local watersheds also playing an important role in transporting sand to the beach.

Although this project focused on San Francisco Bay, the same techniques could be used to study other coastal systems, he added, revealing the incredible life stories of sand from around the world.

Biggest wave ever successfully ridden at Teahupoo?

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Understanding the South China Sea : a very brief overview to an incredibly complex region

 

From SoverignLimits by Zander Bamford-Brown

The global economic and geopolitical importance of the South China Sea (SCS) dispute far outpaces that of any other boundary dispute we have discussed to date.
Half of all the fishing vessels in the world are located in the waters of the South China Sea.
There are also large reserves of oil and natural gas and “some of the world’s most important shipping lanes;” these routes carry more than a fifth of all goods (by value) shipped each year.

Seven states border the South China Sea: China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Vietnam.
I list Taiwan as a separate state despite its disputed sovereignty because they have a unique claim in the South China Sea and independently occupy some of the disputed features.
Each of the seven littoral countries have individual, overlapping, and disputed claim lines to South China Sea maritime territory.

There are five main groups of disputed islands in the South China Sea which are labeled on the map below.
The largest (and most contested) are the Spratly Islands, which are a collection of hundreds of islets and reefs extending from near the coast of the Philippines and Borneo Island towards Vietnam.
Then come the Paracel Islands which are located to the north between Vietnam and China, and far to their southeast is the completely submerged Macclesfield Bank, and yet further southeast is Scarborough Shoal.
To the north, roughly equidistant from Hong Kong and Taiwan are the Pratas Islands.
 

Creating Islands
 

A 2016 Tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) ruled on a case concerning maritime entitlements of the disputed features in the South China Sea brought before it by the Philippines against China.
This case set a precedent for how the South China Sea dispute should be examined under international law.
The Tribunal determined that none of the features in the South China Sea could naturally sustain human habitation or economic life on their own and therefore could not generate a 200 nautical mile (M) Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claim.
This decision by the PCA should limit the claims from all high-tide features to a 12 M territorial sea.
China refused to participate in the case and does not accept the ruling.
Furthermore, all of the littoral states, except the Philippines, continue to claim that the features they occupy are in fact entitled to a 200 M EEZ.
The Tribunal did not rule on international maritime boundaries.

While the Tribunal attempted to classify the features they reviewed based on their composition before they were impacted by humans, many features have been drastically altered to now be able to sustain human and economic life.
China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Taiwan have transformed the features they occupy to include structures such as runways, buildings, deep harbors, military installations, and tourist attractions.
Take for example the transformation of Fiery Cross Reef by China which can be seen below.
From 2014 to 2020, China dredged and built up the reef which was formerly almost entirely submerged.
Besides the runway and deep harbor, the reef now houses defense and administration buildings and energy production facilities.

 

The image on the top is from 2012 QuickBird satellite imagery.
The image on the bottom is from 2020, posted by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which is a great resource on South China Sea development.

However, not all transformation projects are solely for military uses.
Southwest Cay (Đảo Song Tử Tây) is occupied by Vietnam and though it has military structures the leafy island also has facilities for young children (visible on Google Maps photos).
Malaysia in turn developed Swallow Reef (Pulau Layang-Layang) for the general public as a scuba diving destination fully equipped with an airport and a resort.

A Note on the Environmental Impact

Making the features, especially submerged reefs, habitable usually involves dredging, breaking up coral and covering coral reefs with sand and concrete.
This can completely wipe out any ecosystem that existed on and around the feature and, by changing the seabed, can impact many other marine habitats.
However, there are also environmental impacts caused by this dispute which are quotidian and less visible.

The tactics used by the littoral states to solidify their claims include fishing, hydrocarbon extraction, and militarization.
These three methods all have insidious impacts on the waters of the South China Sea.
Overfishing is a serious problem in the disputed waters of the sea, fish stocks are now only between 5% and 30% of what they were in 1950.
Since most of the fish is consumed locally, continued overfishing will not only have severe economic but also nutritional impacts.

Not only are military bases and vessels huge sources of greenhouse gasses but their runoff can pollute waters as well.
Finally, hydrocarbon extraction can have localized impacts through the destructive process of drilling and, potentially, leaks and spills.
While the impacts of this dispute may reverberate around the globe, we must also remember that it is having a local impact and that the people who live on its shores are the ones who will bear the brunt of the environmental impact.

The Claims of Each State

China claims more of the South China Sea than any other nation.
The “nine-dash line” claim, as it is called, is a set of nine line segments that, when connected, cover 90% of the marine area.
Their claim overlaps with the claims of every other littoral state and includes the entirety of all five feature groups described above.
They occupy the Paracel Islands and many features in the Spratly Islands.

Taiwan, which is claimed by China, has historically claimed all of China, and shares China’s claim to the waters of the South China Sea.
The Taiwanese refer to the claim as the “U-shaped line.” Historically, Taiwan claimed sovereignty of all of the waters within the U-shaped line (as China does).
However, they have recently adjusted the phrasing of their claim to instead be limited to the individual features within the SCS and the territorial waters generated by these features as would be compliant with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
This may have been done with the intention of making their claim more valid in international courts and palatable to the international community.
Taiwan occupies the Pratas Islands and Itu Aba Island in the Spratly Island Group.

Vietnam claims the Paracel Islands, Macclesfield Bank, and much of the Spratly Island Group.

 

They occupy many features in the Spratly Islands.
Tensions between China and Vietnam over the disputed waters are often high, and China fishes and sends oil exploration teams in waters claimed by Vietnam, occasionally even sending ships very near the Vietnamese coast in a display of force.
While the Vietnamese government has confronted China and even threatened to take them to an international court over the dispute, Vietnam shares close economic ties to China and will likely not escalate the dispute further.

The Philippines occupies nine features in the Spratly Islands, but they claim most of the island group.
They also claim the unoccupied Scarborough Shoal which is within their 200 M EEZ and therefore should fall under their uncontested sovereignty according to the rules of UNCLOS.
To complicate international relations further, they also claim the Malaysian state of Sabah.

Malaysia, in turn, also claims a number of features within the Spratly Island Group some of which they occupy.
One of the reefs they occupy is Swallow Reef (Pulau Layang-Layang), a renowned scuba diving spot.

Brunei is enclaved by Malaysian territory and waters.
The two nations have come to an agreement on their maritime boundaries and have agreed to a partnership on transboundary oil field explorations.
All of the waters claimed by Brunei are also claimed by China and Taiwan.

Indonesia is unique in the fact that it does not claim any of the actual features in the South China Sea, only a section of the sea north of Indonesia’s Natuna Islands.
Part of this area falls within China’s nine-dash line claim, and Chinese law enforcement and fishing vessels have repeatedly entered the disputed area.

This post should only serve as an introduction to the incredibly complicated geopolitical, economic, and environmental picture of the South China Sea.
Additional blogs could be written about the strategies for mapping such a disputed maritime region, how navies (including those of foreign nations) and fishing boats are being used in sovereignty claims, and provide greater details on the environmental catastrophe of island building.
To end on an uplifting note, despite all of the tensions in the South China Sea there is a good deal of cooperation among the littoral states to manage the waters.
Hopefully this cooperation can eventually be extended into a peaceful resolution of this dispute.

Links :

• Maritime Executive : The U.S and China Tensions Rising Fast
• Geopolital Futures : The Nagging Question in the Indo-Pacific