Question:

Is the greenland ice sheet a significant heat sink?

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in other words, is the continued presence of the GIS ensuring that some places, perhaps far distant from greenland, are colder than they would otherwise be? if the ice sheet disappears, will things suddenly start heating up because it isn't there?

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  1. yes.

    get yourself a glass of ice water.  with a thermometer in it.

    what happens to the temp while the ice melts?  nothing.

    what happens to the temp after all the ice is gone?

    goes up pretty quick.

    that's greenland on a small scale.

    alternatively,  <<Greenland lost roughly 164 cubic miles of ice from April 2004 to

    April 2006 (more than the volume of water in Lake Erie), while the loss

    between 2002 to 2004 was of 57 cubic miles.>>

    Lake Erie volume: 116 cubic miles

    the energy that caused that ice melt is enough to raise the temperature

    of lake Erie from freezing, to boiling.

    AND IN ADDITION, COMPLETELY BOIL AWAY ABOUT 9 CUBIC MILES OF IT.

    That's warming, on a global scale.

    when that much ice melts, the temperature doesn't change.

    0 degree ice, and 0 degree water, are the same temperature.

    but what too many people don't realize is the implication of all the

    energy that the earth is absorbing, and storing.

    which will, in the fairly near future, become far more obvious, when

    there is insufficient ice remaining to absorb all that energy.

    then you'll see heating.

    http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/I...

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4783...

    http://www.livescience.com/environment/a...

    http://www.physorg.com/news77978603.html

    http://news.softpedia.com/news/Greenland...


  2. I don't believe the GIS is a heat sink.  I do believe it is an indicator of warming trends that we are facing.

    The real threat is if the GIS is melting under the ice.  If that comes to be, sooner or later, the vast amount of cold water will burst through the ice and flood the gulf stream, there by plunging Europe into another ice age.

    Research has documented that this happened with a glacier in North East America that held billions of gallons of ice water that burst through somewhere between New York and Boston and stopping the Gulf Stream, the beginning of the last ice age 20,000 years ago.

    Finally, if you look at aerial photos of Greenland and Iceland you will see how white they are and that reflect light.  It then bounces off the ozone and heats things up.  So it the ice melted it could get colder?

  3. A few figures about the GIS, area about 1.71 million square km, 3km thick at its deepest and up to 110,000 years old (ref http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_i... )  Even given a lot of global warming it would take hundreds of years to melt.

    It is true that melting ice absorbs a lot of heat (latent heat) and that snow and ice reflects more heat back into space than a darker surface, but I suspect taking just Greenland that the effects are not all that great.  Greenland looks a lot bigger on a standard map than it really is due to the distortion of the projection.

  4. If you thin Greenland is bad, just look at this,

    http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/i...

    Just imagine......

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