ROCKY REX'S SCIENCE BITES

As global warming continues, heat goes into  all parts of the Earth's systems. The Earth is gaining more heat than it loses, and most of that heat is going into the oceans. More heat is going into the upper parts of  the oceans. The water in the oceans is expanding, which is one reason sea level is rising. The deepest oceans are still cold. Some of the heat is involved in melting ice, including Arctic sea ice. The recent reduction in Arctic sea ice is very dramatic. The  ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica  are also melting.

The climate has changed before. When people say "It's changed before without people, so people can't be involved this time" ....think of  forest fires . Fires happened throughout time, does that mean people can't start fires? Ice ages, warm times ... the geological record in the rocks shows many events. Even so,  the current changes are very unusual . Note that in the "Years before present" scale, zero = 1950 AD Graph based on a  paper  published in 2013 The recent rise in temperature is very fast. What other kinds of changes are happening? Geologists   have compared the past with the present. This report - Climate Change Evidence: The Geological Society of London explains what they have discovered. This is based on part of that report: "Before the current warming trend began, temperatures were declining. This cooling took Earth’s climate into the ‘Little Ice Age’ (1450 – 1850).  Calculations indi...

The invention of the name  Greenland  may mark the start of the advertising industry. The  Saga of the Greenlanders  tells how  Erik the Red , the Icelandic Viking who wanted to get people to join his planned settlement, called it Greenland because a pleasant name would attract more settlers: He called the land which he had found Greenland, because, quoth he, "people will be attracted thither, if the land has a good name."  The  ice sheet  on Greenland covers most of this huge island. Greenland is losing ice, and the mass of ice lost is measured by satellites called GRACE. A survey of Greenland's glaciers  has shown they are speeding up. The speed has increased by about 30% in 10 years. A new NASA project called  Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG)   will observe changing water temperatures on the continental shelf surrounding Greenland, and how marine glaciers react to the presence of warm, salty Atlantic water. Updates a...

Five major  mass extinction  events are recorded in the rock record of the last 600 million years. The biggest extinction was at the end of the  Permian , around 252 million years ago. It is called the  End-Permian mass extinction. Only about 8% of species survived to live on in the Triassic Period. Field photograph of the Permian-Triassic boundary (PTB) section at Xiakou, Hubei Province,  South China. The event played out over 60,000 years. Acidification of the oceans  lasted for about 10,000 years. Two separate pulses of CO2 into the atmosphere - a "one-two punch" - may have been involved in the die-off, according to  new research. CO2 was released by massive volcanism from the  Siberian Traps , now represented as a large region of volcanic rock.  Researchers have found fly ash, one of the products of coal combustion, in rocks laid down just before this extinction event. A large amount of coal h...

El Niño  is an  oscillation of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific , and has important consequences for weather around the world. El Niño  happens every three to seven years. “El Niño” is Spanish for “The Little Boy”. Peruvian fishermen named the event many years ago. They noticed that every few years around Christmas, virtually no fish could be found in the unusually warm waters.  El Niño is marked by  unusually warm ocean temperatures  in the Equatorial Pacific. The opposite conditions are called  La Nina  (The Little Girl), characterized by  unusually cold ocean temperatures  in the Equatorial Pacific.  El Nino clearly affects global temperatures. One piece of evidence that world temperatures are rising is that every  La Nina  ‘year’ since 1998 was warmer than every  El Nino  ‘year’ before 1995:   As the Earth warms, each El Nino 'rides' on a higher base-line global t...

For many years, fishermen in the  North Sea , between Britain and Denmark, have found  fossil bones  in their nets. This fossil catch has yielded over 200 tons of fossil bones, and over 15,000 mammoth teeth.    The bones include remains of  mammoths , three different species of  woolly rhinos ,  hippos ,  lions ,  bears ,  wild horses ,  bison ,  elk ,  reindeer ,  hyenas ,  wolves ,   and  Sabre tooth  cats of at least two species.    They tell us about a whole community of animals. Beneath the North Sea lies a lost landscape. This land was as big as modern Britain - hills and valleys, rivers and forests, marsh and moor.  Sometimes warm and marshy, and at other times a frozen tundra. This has been named  "Doggerland". "Doggerland"  is a name given to  a vast lowland plain, with the northern coastline stretching from Shetland to Jutland. ...

The  State of the Climate in 2016  report was released online on August 10th 2017 by the American Meteorological Society (AMS) 2016 was the warmest year in 137 years of record-keeping - the third year in a row of record-breaking temperatures. The record resulted from the combined influence of long-term global warming and a strong El Niño early in the year. Global average sea level rose to a new record high in 2016. A general increase in the water cycle (the process of evaporating water into air and condensing it as rain or snow), combined with the strong El Niño, enhanced the variability of precipitation around the world. For a fuller account, see the press release from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.