March 1st, 2007Enough Water to Refill the Great Lakes …
In March of 2000 it was the size of Connecticut when it cracked off the leading edge of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. Since then it’s melted a bit and broken into several pieces as it slowly makes its way away from the continent of ice and penguins.
When you think about how much fresh water is contained in this ice berg, it just makes you wonder how we could better capture this and send it to some African country that hasn’t seen rain in the last few years.
Our planet is warming up, there’s no denying that. Whether it’s actually because of humanity or not is not truly understood (since we don’t have an unpopulated earth to compare this world to), but one thing that is known is the effect of large volumes of fresh water melting in the world’s oceans.
As more fresh water melts from the Arctic and Antarctic, the salinity of our oceans decreases. This is especially noticable in the Atlantic, where the massive currents could come to a complete halt as heavy fresh water interferes with the salt water that’s trying to sink as it reaches the northern latitudes such as Iceland and Greenland.
Oddly enough, Global Warming could trigger a Global Cooling in the northern latitudes if the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt were to dramatically shift or halt. This could trigger a potential temperature drop of 5 to 10 °C (9 to 18 °F) in Europe and some parts of North America. This would be roughly equivalent to what these continents faced at the end of the last major ice age 20,000 years ago.
This would be devastating to agriculture and could create millions of environmental refugees.
But, of course, this is all speculation built on computer simulations written by very intelligent people with a serious understanding of how the planet works … right?
There’s very little we humans can do to cool the polar caps more in order to build up their glaciers and increase the Earth’s albeido, but one thing we can do is find an effective use for the massive blocks of fresh water that are melting in our salt water oceans. I wonder what it would take to cut some of these huge ice bergs up and transport them to drought-ridden areas of the world. While it might not be a great idea to just drop the block onto a piece of parched land and let the surrounding villiages come gather as much water and ice as they can carry, I’m sure we can do something to irrigate the lands with this pristine water supply.
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