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Related: About this forumWhat Are The Sinister "Fingers Of Death" Beneath Antarctic Ice?
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17 hours ago
Good luck to anything that gets in its way.
While most of us wouldnt fancy being in the -2°C (28.4°F) water underneath Antarcticas winter ice, for the sea-dwelling critters that usually live there, its positively balmy compared to the surface above. In fact, life thrives there that is, until a so-called finger of death appears.
In the clip below from the BBC series Earths Great Seasons, film crews managed to capture the formation of one such finger, as it eerily crept toward the seabed and, once touching, proceeded to freeze everything within its path.
While such footage might give off the same vibe as a movie featuring the invasion of sinister long-fingered aliens, luckily, no extraterrestrial activity is involved its a brinicle, a tube of ice that grows down in just a matter of hours, containing brine within it.
How do brinicles form?
When sea ice forms, the salts in seawater dont become part of the structure; instead, they form pockets of cold brine within the ice, not freezing because of the high salt content. If given the chance to escape into the water below, this brine ends up sinking the salt content makes it much denser than the water its going into.
More:
https://www.iflscience.com/what-are-the-sinister-fingers-of-death-beneath-antarctic-ice-75961
Think. Again.
(17,987 posts)...that this would be an article on the rivulets of warmer, melted water that have begun reaching under the ice bed and threatening to dislodge (and then melt) the vast areas of frozen ice that keeps our sea-levels from rising incredibly high.
"The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and this means that glaciers, which sit on land, and sea ice, which floats on the ocean surface, are melting rapidly. Two-thirds of Arctic Sea ice has disappeared since 1958 when it was first measured. Between 2000 and 2019, the worlds glaciers lost 267 billon tons of ice each year. Himalayan glaciers are on a trajectory to lose one-third of their ice by 2100, and Alpine glaciers are projected to lose half of theirs.
I can tell you from our research that the bedrock underneath the ice will become exposed at a much higher speed than we think, said Joerg Schaefer, a climate geochemist at the Columbia Climate Schools Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who is researching the Greenland ice sheet. All of the predictions are way too conservative in terms of changethe change will be much faster. Thats true globally. But Greenland might be one of the areas where these predictions of ice change are way, way, way too conservative because of a variety of climate factors.
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Source: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/09/13/what-lies-beneath-melting-glaciers-and-thawing-permafrost/
"Scientists already generally agree that glacier retreat in Antarctica is largely being driven by warm water seeping underneath the icethe process has been demonstrated by multiple studies in the last few years. As the ice melts, the point where it attaches to the bedrock at the bottom of the ocean (commonly known as the grounding line) recedes inland, which can cause the glaciers to become less stable and lose more ice over time."
-snip-
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-glaciers-melting-from-the-bottom-its-complicated/
erronis
(16,844 posts)Thank you so much Judi for bringing these articles to our attention. Science, even the grim truth, brings reality to our lives. After all, politics and human foibles will be subsumed by science, in the end.