Climate change doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about me. It doesn’t care about Donald Trump nor the Resistance. It is just happening and happening faster, and faster, sparking fears of catastrophic impacts that we do not ever want to face. And yet, due to our slow response and the fact that a sizable proportion of the population still denies that the phenomenon even exists, we will have to grin and bear the consequences of decades of inaction as best we can. For a preview of what we might be in for, we can ask the developing world what climate change looks like, they are experiencing it’s gruesome effects now.
Massive flooding in Sierra Leone which recently killed hundreds of peopleHuman caused greenhouse gasses are pumped into the atmosphere from our burning of fossil fuels. These gasses alter the dynamics of polar ice flow and meltwater pouring into the oceans altering the atmospheric and oceanic streams that have created the ideal conditions that have allowed human civilization to flourish.Climate change may be a gradual phenomenon to most of us, but it is a non-linear process with many surprises that escape mainstream attention and fossil fuel corporations propaganda. The changes tiptoe behind us like pancreatic cancer. Undetectable, but at the same time aggressively destroying it’s host until excruciating painful symptoms begin to show. At that time it is too late, becoming inoperable and where chemo is of little help for long term survival.
The University of Copenhagen recently published distressing news about outburst floods in Greenland where a ice dammed meltwater lake is held back by a glacier and begins to leak. The end result is a release of meltwater of “unfathomable quantities”. This phenomenon takes place in frozen mountainous regions across the globe, but has not been identified before in Greenland until the Copenhagen team began reviewing satellite records from the past fifty years. What they discovered was that an enormous lake, known as Lake Catalina, has experienced four such floods. They have taken place during the winter season, “typically from November to March”, says Aslak Grinsted: “The first between 1966 and 1972, the second in 1988-89, the third in 2003-2004 – and the last in 2011-12”. Grinstead noted that another outburst flood will happen quite soon. “It is certainly building right now, and according to the model it will happen at the latest in 2023. However, it may occur as soon as next year, in the winter of 2018-19”.
The outburst floods from Lake Catalina have a volume of 3 km3. That is six times the total volume of all humans. Illustration: Aslak Grinsted“It’s no pond – Lake Catalina is about 10 kilometer long and on average two kilometer wide, and in some parts it may well be hundreds of meter deep. To the best of my knowledge, the depths have never been systematically charted – though a number of expeditions have visited the lake over the years, some have even sailed on it, with a French expedition in the summer of 2016 being the latest”.
The 25 mile long Baily glacier provides the “cork” barring meltwater, originating from Renland ice cap, from streaming out of the lake and into the ocean raising sea levels. The tongue of the glacier “meets Scoresbysund Fjord - which is where the enormous amount of water is finally led out when Lake Catalina cannot hold back any longer”
“The dynamics behind these outburst floods seem to be connected with water pressure in Lake Catalina. What happens is probably that when the water level in the lake reaches a certain high due to sustained influx , the pressure on the glacier below will be so pronounced that it cannot any longer function effectively as a ‘cork’ – which in turn will cause water to start flowing under the glacier and thereby lifting it. Our model shows that following this, the water from the lake will – at some point – start melting its way through Edward Bailey Glacier - and thereby in reality ‘drill’ a tunnel which will function as a drainpipe”.
This drainpipe will lead the water from Lake Catalina into Scoresbysund Fjord, says Aslak Grinsted: “And if you look at the mass of energy released in the entire process, we are really talking big numbers – because the energy behind an outburst flood releasing in the order of 3.4 cubic kilometer fresh water actually equals 240 atomic bombs of the type the Americans dropped over Hiroshima during World War II! And that is enough energy to ‘drill’ a 20 kilometer long tunnel with a diameter of 55 meter straight through the Edward Bailey Glacier”.
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Lake Catalina receives melt water from Renlands ice cap. The top of the ice cap is 2.500 meter above sea level. The melting – and the filling up of Lake Catalina – takes place during the summer. When the water reaches a certain level in Lake Catalina, Edward Bailey Glacier can no longer hold it back – and an outburst flood is a reality.What happens when so much water is lead out into Scoresbysund Fjord over just a few months? “That is a so-called good question”, says Aslak Grinsted:
“We asked people who live in Scoresbysund – in Ittoqqortoorniit – whether they remember noticing anything unusual during the four outburst floods we now know have taken place between 1966 and 2012, and everybody said “no” - which probably means that the floods did not, for instance, cause the water level in Scoresbysund Fjord to rise notably.
Whether these outburst floods can somehow influence ocean currents along East Greenland is another aspect – and it is open for speculation, because at this point we simply don’t know the answer”.
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