The breathless headlines tell us that new studies show that ice melting is causing things
hundreds of miles below the surface to change faster than expected, therefore it "MUST" be due to global warming.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626243/Is-climate-change-making-Earth-EXPAND-Melting-ice-sheets-altering-shape-planet.htmlExcept ...
Nield explains to MailOnline however, that while this particular region may be expanding, the retraction of other areas means as a whole the land stays the same.
'This effect causes the land to uplift (or expand) in the region of the ice-mass loss and this has been measured by GPS stations to be up to 15 millimetres (0.6 inches) a year,' she says.
'The land will uplift at a greater rate closer to the location of the greatest ice-mass loss, so although we do not have GPS stations right next to the thinning glaciers, we would expect the land there to be rising at much more than 15 millimetres a year.
'Likewise the uplift will diminish with distance away from the source of the ice-mass loss, so our GPS site around 200 kilometres (125 miles) away from the source records around one to two millimetres (0.04 to 0.08 inches) a year in uplift.
Translation: "We don't actually have any idea what's happening at the locations of primary concern, but it doesn't sound very exciting to announce that, now does it?"
'Further away still we expect small amounts of subsidence (downwards motion), so Earth as a whole is not expanding or contracting.'
Which, of course, is not exactly the impression conveyed by the headline ...
Since 1995 several ice shelves in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula have collapsed and triggered ice-mass unloading, causing the solid Earth to 'bounce back'.
'Think of it a bit like a stretched piece of elastic,' says Nield, whose project is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
'The ice is pressing down on the Earth and as this weight reduces the crust bounces back. But what we found when we compared the ice loss to the uplift was that they didn't tally – something else had to be happening to be pushing the solid Earth up at such a phenomenal rate.'
Or, in other words, the rapid rise is NOT really correlated to the loss of ice mass, and we really have no idea what the heck is going on ... but that doesn't sound very scientific so we'll continue to blame it on global warming.
