OT: Modelling the Greenland ice sheet

BTW, how was the Doggers bank formed ?

Anyway, look at the big picture. There was a huge amount of ice that needed to be melted. Now the question is, what was the source of the energy ? Clearly it was the Sun.

From the end result (molten ice) it is irrelevant how that energy was transferred from the Sun into the ice, directly by radiation or indirectly by first warming air or water and then let it melt the ice.

With floating ice, the heat transfer is more effective (faster), since it now occurs also from below. Anyway, the total energy needed to melt a kilogram of ice is the same (333 kJ/kg), regardless of heating method.

My original question was, how much warmer the air would have been, if not that much solar energy would have been required to melt the pesky glacial ice ?

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upsidedown
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had a slightly worrying paper on the economics of the disintegration of th e Greenland ice sheet

have got the idea that the ice sheet could suddenly start sliding off in l arge chunks, as ice sheets have been known to do in the not all-that-geolog ical past, like at the end of the most recent ice age.

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hey don't slide back up hill again.

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e Netherlands. It's a heap of rocks and dirt that collected here when the R hine was a glacier, and melted here when the flowing ice got warm enough.

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e's no ocean handy), it would have slid off over the top of the accumulated rocks.

idn't slide off over the area. The rocks that get into ice sheets can stay in the ice until the chunk of ice is well out to sea - as evidenced by the "accidentals" on the floor of the North Atlantic.

Do your own googling.

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Apparently the likelist explanation is a morraine, but that says nothing ab out when the relevant glciers were flowing, and from where.

Originally.

The oceans store a lot of heat, and the process of melting floating ice ber gs taps that - the sea water that gets cooled around the ice berg sinks (if it warmer than 4C, and ocean water tends to be warmer than that) and pushe s up warmer water from below. The fresh water coming off the ice-berg messe s with this a bit, but it takes a lot bigger mass of warmish water to melt an iceberg than the volume of fresh water produced.

It's probably the wrong question - as I said ocean water stores a lot of he at, and the temperature deep ocean water isn't tighly coupled the temperatu re of the air above it (or its CO2 content for that matter). Time constants of 800 years show up for both.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
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Bill Sloman

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