Does anyone think the Antarctic Iceberg was caused by Environmentalist?

Question

In Dr. Michael Crichton’s book 'State of Fear', environmentalist attempted to 'calf' a massive iceberg by setting off explosives.

The plan was then to use this iceberg as proof that global warming was a problem that needed immediate action.

Do you think there's any possibility that this is what cause the iceberg to form in Antarctica?

Was the man made cause the work of environmentalist? Do you think explosives may have been used?

Answer 1

Icebergs form from the ice in warmer weather. The navy have tried explosives on icebergs that float into ship lanes without too much success. The ice will absorb a huge shock without breaking in the coal months.

Answer 2

Would the media attention really be worth that? That is a big change.

Answer 3

Crichton's science fiction novel also claimed that James Hansen's models were off by 300%, that scientists were warning of an impending ice age in the 1970s, and that the surface temperature record is biased.  There were a lot of inaccuracies and dumb plotlines in that book.

Answer 4

The berg was 7 times the size of manhattan. How much explosive would it take? Hmmmm. I think someone would have noticed the cargo planes coming in full of explosives every day for the last 5 years to pull this off.

You are showing more and more desperation with your posts lately. Saying that the ice shelf was evidence against AGW because it shows the poles are warming faster than the rest of the earth is unbelievably ridiculous.

Answer 5

I think ice would absorb most of the energy over a wide area.  What they really need is a gigantic Ice Pick!

Ever try a hammer on a solid block of ice?  Ice pick wins hands down.  Unless your intent is to pulverize it into millions of pieces, then a hammer or explosives work great.

Answer 6

Well here's an opportune time to haul it to Texas. Do you remember that proposal about 20-30 years ago. Everybody was laughing their behinds off then also.

Answer 7

Floating sea ice can be boken up over a wide area with an explosion that sends out waves from below. This strategy is used to make it possible to extricate a ship from sea ice.

The small size and depth could make this totally undetectable.

We have no evidence that this has happened, even though in concept it is possible.

A change in ocean curents that brings more water past the ice field is well and truly capable of causing this, even without global warming. Unfortunately we had not anticipated this and too little measurements were undertaken to give us a quick and convincing answer.

Now, quick  reformation of the ice field, if it happened in early summer, would point to an explosion or seismic action. We know there was no seismic event likely. But in fall, reformation of the ice field would be expected simply because it is fall.

So we could have had an explosion to trigger the break up, but evidence would be inconclusive at best. Unless someone actually finds material evidence, this possibility should not be used, It is dealving into extremely weak arguments, weakening credibility.

Answer 8

Explosives are old school.  These environmentalists did it in a much more subtle fashion.  What they did was form a cabal about 200 years ago to develop the steam engine, which started the industrial age, leading to mankind's use of fossil fuels (and concomitant expansion in population), and rapidly increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  The environmentalists knew that the increase in CO2 would warm the planet, causing destabilization of the Antarctic peninsular ice sheets so that they would collapse spectacularly precisely when mankind developed satellite imagery capable of monitoring them in detail.  The collapse of the ice sheets could then be used by these environmentalists, just as predicted by Michael Chricton, to justify draconian measures to control anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.  It's such a diabolically clever plot even a genius like Chricton can't understand how it is working.  Chricton has to resort to <insert derisive snort here> explosives.  What a n00b.

Answer 9

Crichton ignored the medieval warm period?  I wonder how he missed that one?  Global warming fanatics surely missed it and are trying to eliminate that and the mini-ice age from the history books.  Wonder what caused the warming back then?  Funny when CO2 increased, we got cooler.

Answer 10

Chrichton overlooks the all important Medieval Calving Period.

Answer 11

Not at all plausible. The cause was a rare phenomena called the "runaway" effect.  Their is immense attention being paid to this, because of the rapid effect it could have on the remainder of the shelf.

Answer 12

And in another Crichton book they brought back dinosaurs.

Meanwhile in the real world, The Russians tried this a few years ago on just a river in northern Russia having their air force drop large bombs, the effect was nothing, they hardly made a dent. One of the other answers suggested it was used to get ships out of ice this is also impossible, any explosion large enough to get through even a couple of meters of ice would have to be near the ship and would destroy it. Ice is naturally very strong but it also has elastic properties and the ability to absorb even very large explosions. Even a really good icebreaker can only manage ~3-4 meters of sea ice thickness the river in Russia was about the same, a fresh tabular iceberg usually has about ~30-50m of ice clear of the water, so 9x that below the water.

The only stories I have heard of this are from the 50's it was tried by the U.S. (Navy?) but didn't work

As for breaking off a burg of the size in question, I would doubt ALL the explosives the U.S. Army has could do it.

Answer 13

How much ice broke off, 1% or 2%, I'm scared.

How is it that GW made AL Gore ?

Answer 14

Nahh... Possibly...

It was probably from natural changes.

Environmentalists aren't smart enough to do anything like that.

Answer 15

No.  Miles of ice shelf detached.

Either they are brilliant engineers (and the shelf was ready to go anyway) or they had a LOT of explosives, and got away completely undetected.

If this is what happened, you should give up and surrender.  They're just too good.

EDIT - Wow.  Worldemperor and I agree on something.

Answer 16

Hmmmm..... That is a reasonable conspiracy theory but the first thing you would need is proof. I don't believe in global warming but I really don't think environmentalists did that. It should shatter the ice if they set off explosions there. If it shouldn't shatter the ice tell me now. This is interesting though.

Edit: Even if environmentalists did this, it can't be linked to man made global warming. But it certainly can be linked to man made broken ice.

Answer 17

Wow! What an idea!

You are SO smart, you should run for President!

Oh, wait, there is already a Liar as President! Oh well, you could run for President of China! They don`t care about destroying the Earth either!

Answer 18

no, that's ludicrous.

Answer 19

Naaaaw!  Enviro whackos are to busy destroying SUVs and burning houses.

Friends of the Earth are Enemies of Humanity = they want us ALL dead to 'save' the planet!

The iceberg 'calved off' because of warming water diminished some of the 90% of ice supporting the ice shelf.

Antarctica is also on the Pacific Ring of Fire and if you bother to look at the map of the Ring of fire you might see a great temperature anomally around Australia.

One of the honest entries on Whackopedia:

Pacific Ring of Fire - Note Antarctica area:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Rin...

Huge heat anomaly:  (8 degree C = huge)

http://coralreefwatch.noaa.gov/satellite...

Answer 20

it was melted by all of Clinton & Obama's hot air

Answer 21

Most peoples reaction to something like that would be disbelief - people do not do things like that.  

I know activists and politicians are capable of some extraordinary things.  Take the link below for example - it's a hoax - it just seemed too incredible to be true so I did some investigating.  The event never happened, the media story was just timed to coincide with some government funding announcement during an election campaign.

If activists do try something like that it will be timed to coincide with an election campaign or some similar significant event.