Largest iceberg on record breaks off and heads out into the ocean.

[usmbguest5318]

Well considering the Extremely short period we have been able to record calving events, there is no way to know how large this one is by comparison. 10 icebergs 3 times this size could have calved off prior to this one. The first recorded sighting of Antarctic Ice Shelf wasn't until the 1800's. We have no clue what occurred before that with respect to calving. Remember, climatology is the study weather over l o n g periods of time, periods of times measured by decades and centuries. Perspective my friend, perspective.

The first recorded sighting of Antarctic Ice Shelf wasn't until the 1800's.

Do you think sailors making the Drake Passage would not have noticed an iceberg the size of Delaware? The passage itself is only about 200 miles wide. I can assure you they's notice a block of ice the size of Delaware and it wouldn't have to be right in front of them for them to do so.

Who would have noticed one two weeks ago, Einstein?

Anyone who saw a chunk of ice the size of Delaware floating free in the water would have noticed it.

You can't see the iceberg from the course he took, dufus.

Calculate how far away an object 200 meters into the air can be for one to see it on the ocean while standing in the "crows nest" some 150-200 feet (my guess based on knowing that the main mast on my boat, which is considerably smaller than the Golden Hind, is reaches 70 feet) above sea level.

Dude, you are clueless. Save your theoretical calculations and deal with 3 doses of reality-

Reality 1-

International waters are 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from shore. This is largely because when on a ship (or about the same vantage point above the surface on shore), you can see a ship breach the horizon at about the 12 mile mark. (Both you and the ship are above sea level/horizon.) Boat captains say, on average, you can see ships on the horizon or land at about 12 miles. Of course that assumes clear skies and no fog.

Reality 2-

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Reality 3-
The path of the ice berg can not be predicted, but if it follows the path of other calved bergs, it won't be passing thru Drakes Passage. Boats travel the passage generally would not want to go farther south than necessary. Sorry, you lost Big with this one.

View attachment 139160

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

​

B-15, the largest ever recorded iceberg, calved off of Antarctica in 2000. It broke into smaller pieces, one of which was B-15J. B-15J was spotted ~1700 miles southeast of New Zealand. At that time, November 2011, it was ~12 miles across. By December 2011 it'd crumbled/melted to a few miles, not a few hundred feet, across. (1700 miles is about half the distance between New Zealand and Antarctica.)

"Until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." The point is that, yes, state-sized icebergs (BABs -- big ass 'bergs) break apart as they head into warmer waters, but one'd expect sailors, merchants, whalers, marine researchers, pilots, thrill seekers, explorers, etc. collectively to see many town/city sized ones had icebergs the size of states been breaking off "all the time" for thousands of years. ("Many" being appreciably more than than one or four since 1882.) And yet, what we've observed is that BABs and remnants of them have appeared in the past 20 or so years at a notably greater frequency -- every two to four years -- than they did between 1979 and 1997, during which period there was one.

Then there's the fact that such huge chunks of ice take literally several thousand years to form -- Larsen C took something in excess of 3200 years to form. For such BABs to calve off at the rate you suggest -- "all the time for thousands of years" -- there'd have to have been a hell of a lot more ice on the polar caps than has been recorded over the past centuries. That is to say, the Ross, Larsen, et al ice shelves would have to have been considerably larger than they were recorded as being. The rate you're suggesting is too fast for the ice to reform into new shelves and then re-calve as yet another BAB and hold constant the size of the shelf from which the BAB calved. (Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.)

 

[skookerasbil]

meh.....this shit happens all the time. Only those prone to the hysterical are moved.........every AGW climate crusaders head exploded last week with this news. The ENVIRONMENT forum was particularly laughable.

When Antarctica breaks in half, come talk to us.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Anyone who saw a chunk of ice the size of Delaware floating free in the water would have noticed it.

You can't see the iceberg from the course he took, dufus.

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

Sad.

Maybe Drake picked it up on radar?

Oh wait, even today's ships don't have that kind of radar range.

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

The Drake Passage isn't 600 miles wide. How wide it is isn't the point. The point is that if there is an iceberg floating free in it and one sails somewhat distantly from it, one will see it. If one doesn't see it, one doesn't, but if it's there one will notice it.

Why do the left hate science?

Drake Passage, deep waterway, 600 miles (1,000 km) wide, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and the South Shetland Islands, situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Drake Passage | waterway, South America | Britannica.com

My mistake. I had in mind the width of the Straits of Magellan and confused the two distances.

My mistake notwithstanding, "until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." It stands to reason that were, as you suggest, calvings of roughly Delaware sized (Larsen C is ~4200 square miles) icebergs a routine thing that's been happening for thousands of years, humanity almost certainly would have prior to or after 1882 come by more than just one ~32 square mile iceberg.

Even if they hit it they would have thought it was ice covered land, dufus.
Or did the helicopter on board Drakes ship go out and verify?

 

[Weatherman2020]

Do you think sailors making the Drake Passage would not have noticed an iceberg the size of Delaware? The passage itself is only about 200 miles wide. I can assure you they's notice a block of ice the size of Delaware and it wouldn't have to be right in front of them for them to do so.

Who would have noticed one two weeks ago, Einstein?

Anyone who saw a chunk of ice the size of Delaware floating free in the water would have noticed it.

You can't see the iceberg from the course he took, dufus.

Calculate how far away an object 200 meters into the air can be for one to see it on the ocean while standing in the "crows nest" some 150-200 feet (my guess based on knowing that the main mast on my boat, which is considerably smaller than the Golden Hind, is reaches 70 feet) above sea level.

Dude, you are clueless. Save your theoretical calculations and deal with 3 doses of reality-

Reality 1-

International waters are 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from shore. This is largely because when on a ship (or about the same vantage point above the surface on shore), you can see a ship breach the horizon at about the 12 mile mark. (Both you and the ship are above sea level/horizon.) Boat captains say, on average, you can see ships on the horizon or land at about 12 miles. Of course that assumes clear skies and no fog.

Reality 2-

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Reality 3-
The path of the ice berg can not be predicted, but if it follows the path of other calved bergs, it won't be passing thru Drakes Passage. Boats travel the passage generally would not want to go farther south than necessary. Sorry, you lost Big with this one.

View attachment 139160

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

​

B-15, the largest ever recorded iceberg, calved off of Antarctica in 2000. It broke into smaller pieces, one of which was B-15J. B-15J was spotted ~1700 miles southeast of New Zealand. At that time, November 2011, it was ~12 miles across. By December 2011 it'd crumbled/melted to a few miles, not a few hundred feet, across. (1700 miles is about half the distance between New Zealand and Antarctica.)

"Until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." The point is that, yes, state-sized icebergs (BABs -- big ass 'bergs) break apart as they head into warmer waters, but one'd expect sailors, merchants, whalers, marine researchers, pilots, thrill seekers, explorers, etc. collectively to see many town/city sized ones had icebergs the size of states been breaking off "all the time" for thousands of years. ("Many" being appreciably more than than one or four since 1882.) And yet, what we've observed is that BABs and remnants of them have appeared in the past 20 or so years at a notably greater frequency -- every two to four years -- than they did between 1979 and 1997, during which period there was one.

Then there's the fact that such huge chunks of ice take literally several thousand years to form -- Larsen C took something in excess of 3200 years to form. For such BABs to calve off at the rate you suggest -- "all the time for thousands of years" -- there'd have to have been a hell of a lot more ice on the polar caps than has been recorded over the past centuries. That is to say, the Ross, Larsen, et al ice shelves would have to have been considerably larger than they were recorded as being. The rate you're suggesting is too fast for the ice to reform into new shelves and then re-calve as yet another BAB and hold constant the size of the shelf from which the BAB calved. (Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.)

"Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004."
And yet mankind never heard about it again, and we all survived.

 

[OldLady]

This means penguin immigrants to South America. I wonder how fast it will float. If the penguins go fishing, will they be able to find "home" when they return, or will it have floated away?
It WILL be interesting to know how long it takes to melt.

It IS disconcerting that enough ice melted that such a huge piece of it broke loose.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

From which article did you find statements indicating the event is a "naturally occurring one that has been happening for 1000s of years?" Please copy and paste the statements you feel establish that fact.

The fact of the matter is that I did read the linked article from the OP. I also read the linked article entitled "Ice shelf to Antarctica iceberg." In that article I found the following:

• Larsen C is the third massive ice shelf that’s broken off from the Antarctic Peninsula during the past 22 years:
  
  
  
  
  
  This year, sea ice around Antarctica was at its lowest level since scientists started continuously measuring it in 1979.
  
  
  
  
  (Notice that sea ice is differently colored from ice shelf ice. Why? Because ice shelves, though they are floating, are attached to the land, whereas sea ice is not.)
  
  On Feb. 13, in the midst of summer, Antarctic sea ice covered a total of 6.26 million square miles. That’s 790,000 square miles less than the average from 1981 to 2010 or equivalent to a chunk of ice larger than Mexico.

Within that there is nothing providing a sound basis for one to infer that the calving of chucks of ice that in total exceed the size of Mexico has been going on for thousands of years.

In that same article is found the following graphic.

What is reasonable to infer from that graphic is that it took thousands of years for one-third of a mile tall/deep Delaware-sized areas of ice to form the former Larsen C ice shelf. A quick check of Antarctic average total precipitation reveals that it's about 6.5 inches. Using nothing but arithmetic, one finds that amounts to 3200+ years of precipitation, and that is clearly an underestimation of the actual years it takes because the precipitation that falls is snow and ice is compacted snow, which means it takes longer than 3200 yeas for 1760 feet of ice to result from thousands of years of 6.5 inches of freshly fallen fluffy snow.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

If that were so, perhaps your buddy, Weatherman, who also doesn't know what he's talking about, perhaps would not have written the following:

That didn't take long at all.

I wrote "perhaps" because irrational, delusional and generally ignorant folks are as likely to say "A" as they are "the opposite of A."​

More importantly, were that so, the source article might not report, "Ice shelves are permanent floating sheets of ice connected to a landmass, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center." Clearly the are only as permanently attached as is the cold weather that inhibits ice melt.

Here is some comfort for you- I know you want this event to be further "evidence" (as if there is any) of AGW, BUT ITS NOT! You want a cited reference that calving is a natural process and has been going on for 1000's of years? Why don't you quote a source that says ice bergs are a new phenomenon created by AGW? Where do you think ice bergs come from? Honestly, some people have no common sense at all.

What Does the Antarctic Ice Shelf Break Really Mean?
We’ve been surprised by the level of interest in what may simply be a rare but natural occurrence. Because, despite the media and public fascination, the Larsen C rift and iceberg “calving” is not a warning of imminent sea level rise, and any link to climate change is far from straightforward. This event is, however, a spectacular episode in the recent history of Antarctica’s ice shelves, involving forces beyond the human scale, in a place where few of us have been, and one which will fundamentally change the geography of this region.

The concern is that the Larsen iceshelf has been slowing/preventing glacial calving directly into the ocean. Now that iceshelf is pretty much kaflooey. Glaciers move slowly, but inexorably toward the sea. It will no doubt be many years before calving along what used to be the Larsen iceshelf contributes to sea level rise. But it certainly will.
If the weather weren't warmer, would the iceshelf have broken away in the past 30 years? Who knows? Warmer weather certainly had something to do with it, though, and human burning of fossil fuels has contributed to the warmer weather. Only very very rich people with their fortunes entwined with fossil fuels need to pretend the human contribution to global warming doesn't exist. Unfortunately, the Republicans took it on as a political agenda item and now we've got the inaccurate "fake news" propaganda going around to support ignoring scientific fact. The Republicans should have kept out of it.

 

[usmbguest5318]

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

Sad.

Maybe Drake picked it up on radar?

Oh wait, even today's ships don't have that kind of radar range.

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

The Drake Passage isn't 600 miles wide. How wide it is isn't the point. The point is that if there is an iceberg floating free in it and one sails somewhat distantly from it, one will see it. If one doesn't see it, one doesn't, but if it's there one will notice it.

Why do the left hate science?

Drake Passage, deep waterway, 600 miles (1,000 km) wide, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and the South Shetland Islands, situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Drake Passage | waterway, South America | Britannica.com

My mistake. I had in mind the width of the Straits of Magellan and confused the two distances.

My mistake notwithstanding, "until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." It stands to reason that were, as you suggest, calvings of roughly Delaware sized (Larsen C is ~4200 square miles) icebergs a routine thing that's been happening for thousands of years, humanity almost certainly would have prior to or after 1882 come by more than just one ~32 square mile iceberg.

Even if they hit it they would have thought it was ice covered land, dufus.

And you think that because of what? (Click the link below, which is a repost from post 81.)

• Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.

Your supposition defies the extant evidence. In the 1500s, people knew where the land portion of Antarctica was and where what they saw was ice protruding from the land. How they came to know that baffles people, but the fact remains that they did know. Accordingly, it stands to reason that it's more likely they'd have realized the BAB they encountered/observed was indeed a BAB and not ice-covered land.

 

[Weatherman2020]

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

Sad.

Maybe Drake picked it up on radar?

Oh wait, even today's ships don't have that kind of radar range.

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

The Drake Passage isn't 600 miles wide. How wide it is isn't the point. The point is that if there is an iceberg floating free in it and one sails somewhat distantly from it, one will see it. If one doesn't see it, one doesn't, but if it's there one will notice it.

Why do the left hate science?

Drake Passage, deep waterway, 600 miles (1,000 km) wide, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and the South Shetland Islands, situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Drake Passage | waterway, South America | Britannica.com

My mistake. I had in mind the width of the Straits of Magellan and confused the two distances.

My mistake notwithstanding, "until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." It stands to reason that were, as you suggest, calvings of roughly Delaware sized (Larsen C is ~4200 square miles) icebergs a routine thing that's been happening for thousands of years, humanity almost certainly would have prior to or after 1882 come by more than just one ~32 square mile iceberg.

Even if they hit it they would have thought it was ice covered land, dufus.

And you think that because of what? (Click the link below, which is a repost from post 81.)

• Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.

Your supposition defies the extant evidence. In the 1500s, people knew where the land portion of Antarctica was and where what they saw was ice protruding from the land. How they came to know that baffles people, but the fact remains that they did know. Accordingly, it stands to reason that it's more likely they'd have realized the BAB they encountered/observed was indeed a BAB and not ice-covered land.

Oh gee, yet life on earth flourished in your doomsday scenario.

Only a science hater thinks todays climate is optimum for life.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Who would have noticed one two weeks ago, Einstein?

Anyone who saw a chunk of ice the size of Delaware floating free in the water would have noticed it.

You can't see the iceberg from the course he took, dufus.

Calculate how far away an object 200 meters into the air can be for one to see it on the ocean while standing in the "crows nest" some 150-200 feet (my guess based on knowing that the main mast on my boat, which is considerably smaller than the Golden Hind, is reaches 70 feet) above sea level.

Dude, you are clueless. Save your theoretical calculations and deal with 3 doses of reality-

Reality 1-

International waters are 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from shore. This is largely because when on a ship (or about the same vantage point above the surface on shore), you can see a ship breach the horizon at about the 12 mile mark. (Both you and the ship are above sea level/horizon.) Boat captains say, on average, you can see ships on the horizon or land at about 12 miles. Of course that assumes clear skies and no fog.

Reality 2-

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Reality 3-
The path of the ice berg can not be predicted, but if it follows the path of other calved bergs, it won't be passing thru Drakes Passage. Boats travel the passage generally would not want to go farther south than necessary. Sorry, you lost Big with this one.

View attachment 139160

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

​

B-15, the largest ever recorded iceberg, calved off of Antarctica in 2000. It broke into smaller pieces, one of which was B-15J. B-15J was spotted ~1700 miles southeast of New Zealand. At that time, November 2011, it was ~12 miles across. By December 2011 it'd crumbled/melted to a few miles, not a few hundred feet, across. (1700 miles is about half the distance between New Zealand and Antarctica.)

"Until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." The point is that, yes, state-sized icebergs (BABs -- big ass 'bergs) break apart as they head into warmer waters, but one'd expect sailors, merchants, whalers, marine researchers, pilots, thrill seekers, explorers, etc. collectively to see many town/city sized ones had icebergs the size of states been breaking off "all the time" for thousands of years. ("Many" being appreciably more than than one or four since 1882.) And yet, what we've observed is that BABs and remnants of them have appeared in the past 20 or so years at a notably greater frequency -- every two to four years -- than they did between 1979 and 1997, during which period there was one.

Then there's the fact that such huge chunks of ice take literally several thousand years to form -- Larsen C took something in excess of 3200 years to form. For such BABs to calve off at the rate you suggest -- "all the time for thousands of years" -- there'd have to have been a hell of a lot more ice on the polar caps than has been recorded over the past centuries. That is to say, the Ross, Larsen, et al ice shelves would have to have been considerably larger than they were recorded as being. The rate you're suggesting is too fast for the ice to reform into new shelves and then re-calve as yet another BAB and hold constant the size of the shelf from which the BAB calved. (Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.)

"Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004."
And yet mankind never heard about it again, and we all survived.

Non sequitur -- the concern about massive calvings of BABs has nothing to do with humanity's ability to persist on the planet.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Anyone who saw a chunk of ice the size of Delaware floating free in the water would have noticed it.

You can't see the iceberg from the course he took, dufus.

Calculate how far away an object 200 meters into the air can be for one to see it on the ocean while standing in the "crows nest" some 150-200 feet (my guess based on knowing that the main mast on my boat, which is considerably smaller than the Golden Hind, is reaches 70 feet) above sea level.

Dude, you are clueless. Save your theoretical calculations and deal with 3 doses of reality-

Reality 1-

International waters are 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from shore. This is largely because when on a ship (or about the same vantage point above the surface on shore), you can see a ship breach the horizon at about the 12 mile mark. (Both you and the ship are above sea level/horizon.) Boat captains say, on average, you can see ships on the horizon or land at about 12 miles. Of course that assumes clear skies and no fog.

Reality 2-

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Reality 3-
The path of the ice berg can not be predicted, but if it follows the path of other calved bergs, it won't be passing thru Drakes Passage. Boats travel the passage generally would not want to go farther south than necessary. Sorry, you lost Big with this one.

View attachment 139160

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

​

B-15, the largest ever recorded iceberg, calved off of Antarctica in 2000. It broke into smaller pieces, one of which was B-15J. B-15J was spotted ~1700 miles southeast of New Zealand. At that time, November 2011, it was ~12 miles across. By December 2011 it'd crumbled/melted to a few miles, not a few hundred feet, across. (1700 miles is about half the distance between New Zealand and Antarctica.)

"Until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." The point is that, yes, state-sized icebergs (BABs -- big ass 'bergs) break apart as they head into warmer waters, but one'd expect sailors, merchants, whalers, marine researchers, pilots, thrill seekers, explorers, etc. collectively to see many town/city sized ones had icebergs the size of states been breaking off "all the time" for thousands of years. ("Many" being appreciably more than than one or four since 1882.) And yet, what we've observed is that BABs and remnants of them have appeared in the past 20 or so years at a notably greater frequency -- every two to four years -- than they did between 1979 and 1997, during which period there was one.

Then there's the fact that such huge chunks of ice take literally several thousand years to form -- Larsen C took something in excess of 3200 years to form. For such BABs to calve off at the rate you suggest -- "all the time for thousands of years" -- there'd have to have been a hell of a lot more ice on the polar caps than has been recorded over the past centuries. That is to say, the Ross, Larsen, et al ice shelves would have to have been considerably larger than they were recorded as being. The rate you're suggesting is too fast for the ice to reform into new shelves and then re-calve as yet another BAB and hold constant the size of the shelf from which the BAB calved. (Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.)

"Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004."
And yet mankind never heard about it again, and we all survived.

Non sequitur -- the concern about massive calvings of BABs has nothing to do with humanity's ability to persist on the planet.

Where's your 2004 iceberg the size of Connecticut? Is it endangering shipping off of Miami yet?

 

[usmbguest5318]

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

Sad.

Maybe Drake picked it up on radar?

Oh wait, even today's ships don't have that kind of radar range.

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

The Drake Passage isn't 600 miles wide. How wide it is isn't the point. The point is that if there is an iceberg floating free in it and one sails somewhat distantly from it, one will see it. If one doesn't see it, one doesn't, but if it's there one will notice it.

Why do the left hate science?

Drake Passage, deep waterway, 600 miles (1,000 km) wide, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and the South Shetland Islands, situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Drake Passage | waterway, South America | Britannica.com

My mistake. I had in mind the width of the Straits of Magellan and confused the two distances.

My mistake notwithstanding, "until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." It stands to reason that were, as you suggest, calvings of roughly Delaware sized (Larsen C is ~4200 square miles) icebergs a routine thing that's been happening for thousands of years, humanity almost certainly would have prior to or after 1882 come by more than just one ~32 square mile iceberg.

Even if they hit it they would have thought it was ice covered land, dufus.

And you think that because of what? (Click the link below, which is a repost from post 81.)

• Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.

Your supposition defies the extant evidence. In the 1500s, people knew where the land portion of Antarctica was and where what they saw was ice protruding from the land. How they came to know that baffles people, but the fact remains that they did know. Accordingly, it stands to reason that it's more likely they'd have realized the BAB they encountered/observed was indeed a BAB and not ice-covered land.

Oh gee, yet life on earth flourished in your doomsday scenario.

Non sequitur, again. It's not a matter of whether life will persist on the planet.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Calculate how far away an object 200 meters into the air can be for one to see it on the ocean while standing in the "crows nest" some 150-200 feet (my guess based on knowing that the main mast on my boat, which is considerably smaller than the Golden Hind, is reaches 70 feet) above sea level.

Dude, you are clueless. Save your theoretical calculations and deal with 3 doses of reality-

Reality 1-

International waters are 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from shore. This is largely because when on a ship (or about the same vantage point above the surface on shore), you can see a ship breach the horizon at about the 12 mile mark. (Both you and the ship are above sea level/horizon.) Boat captains say, on average, you can see ships on the horizon or land at about 12 miles. Of course that assumes clear skies and no fog.

Reality 2-

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Reality 3-
The path of the ice berg can not be predicted, but if it follows the path of other calved bergs, it won't be passing thru Drakes Passage. Boats travel the passage generally would not want to go farther south than necessary. Sorry, you lost Big with this one.

View attachment 139160

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

​

B-15, the largest ever recorded iceberg, calved off of Antarctica in 2000. It broke into smaller pieces, one of which was B-15J. B-15J was spotted ~1700 miles southeast of New Zealand. At that time, November 2011, it was ~12 miles across. By December 2011 it'd crumbled/melted to a few miles, not a few hundred feet, across. (1700 miles is about half the distance between New Zealand and Antarctica.)

"Until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." The point is that, yes, state-sized icebergs (BABs -- big ass 'bergs) break apart as they head into warmer waters, but one'd expect sailors, merchants, whalers, marine researchers, pilots, thrill seekers, explorers, etc. collectively to see many town/city sized ones had icebergs the size of states been breaking off "all the time" for thousands of years. ("Many" being appreciably more than than one or four since 1882.) And yet, what we've observed is that BABs and remnants of them have appeared in the past 20 or so years at a notably greater frequency -- every two to four years -- than they did between 1979 and 1997, during which period there was one.

Then there's the fact that such huge chunks of ice take literally several thousand years to form -- Larsen C took something in excess of 3200 years to form. For such BABs to calve off at the rate you suggest -- "all the time for thousands of years" -- there'd have to have been a hell of a lot more ice on the polar caps than has been recorded over the past centuries. That is to say, the Ross, Larsen, et al ice shelves would have to have been considerably larger than they were recorded as being. The rate you're suggesting is too fast for the ice to reform into new shelves and then re-calve as yet another BAB and hold constant the size of the shelf from which the BAB calved. (Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.)

"Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004."
And yet mankind never heard about it again, and we all survived.

Non sequitur -- the concern about massive calvings of BABs has nothing to do with humanity's ability to persist on the planet.

Where's your 2004 iceberg the size of Connecticut? Is it endangering shipping off of Miami yet?

Non sequitur, again. Whether it would have, could have or will isn't the point of anyone's concern about it or any other BAB calving off of a polar ice cap.

 

[Weatherman2020]

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

Sad.

Maybe Drake picked it up on radar?

Oh wait, even today's ships don't have that kind of radar range.

The anti science left think the world is flat and people can see something 600 miles away while sitting on the ocean.

The Drake Passage isn't 600 miles wide. How wide it is isn't the point. The point is that if there is an iceberg floating free in it and one sails somewhat distantly from it, one will see it. If one doesn't see it, one doesn't, but if it's there one will notice it.

Why do the left hate science?

Drake Passage, deep waterway, 600 miles (1,000 km) wide, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and the South Shetland Islands, situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Drake Passage | waterway, South America | Britannica.com

My mistake. I had in mind the width of the Straits of Magellan and confused the two distances.

My mistake notwithstanding, "until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." It stands to reason that were, as you suggest, calvings of roughly Delaware sized (Larsen C is ~4200 square miles) icebergs a routine thing that's been happening for thousands of years, humanity almost certainly would have prior to or after 1882 come by more than just one ~32 square mile iceberg.

Even if they hit it they would have thought it was ice covered land, dufus.

And you think that because of what? (Click the link below, which is a repost from post 81.)

• Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.

Your supposition defies the extant evidence. In the 1500s, people knew where the land portion of Antarctica was and where what they saw was ice protruding from the land. How they came to know that baffles people, but the fact remains that they did know. Accordingly, it stands to reason that it's more likely they'd have realized the BAB they encountered/observed was indeed a BAB and not ice-covered land.

Oh gee, yet life on earth flourished in your doomsday scenario.

Non sequitur, again. It's not a matter of whether life will persist on the planet.

So the entire OP is about a nothing turd. Thanks for admitting it.

 

[usmbguest5318]

The Drake Passage isn't 600 miles wide. How wide it is isn't the point. The point is that if there is an iceberg floating free in it and one sails somewhat distantly from it, one will see it. If one doesn't see it, one doesn't, but if it's there one will notice it.

Why do the left hate science?

Drake Passage, deep waterway, 600 miles (1,000 km) wide, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans between Cape Horn (the southernmost point of South America) and the South Shetland Islands, situated about 100 miles (160 km) north of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Drake Passage | waterway, South America | Britannica.com

My mistake. I had in mind the width of the Straits of Magellan and confused the two distances.

My mistake notwithstanding, "until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." It stands to reason that were, as you suggest, calvings of roughly Delaware sized (Larsen C is ~4200 square miles) icebergs a routine thing that's been happening for thousands of years, humanity almost certainly would have prior to or after 1882 come by more than just one ~32 square mile iceberg.

Even if they hit it they would have thought it was ice covered land, dufus.

And you think that because of what? (Click the link below, which is a repost from post 81.)

• Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.

Your supposition defies the extant evidence. In the 1500s, people knew where the land portion of Antarctica was and where what they saw was ice protruding from the land. How they came to know that baffles people, but the fact remains that they did know. Accordingly, it stands to reason that it's more likely they'd have realized the BAB they encountered/observed was indeed a BAB and not ice-covered land.

Oh gee, yet life on earth flourished in your doomsday scenario.

Non sequitur, again. It's not a matter of whether life will persist on the planet.

So the entire OP is about a nothing turd. Thanks for admitting it.

Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

 

[BuckToothMoron]

This means penguin immigrants to South America. I wonder how fast it will float. If the penguins go fishing, will they be able to find "home" when they return, or will it have floated away?
It WILL be interesting to know how long it takes to melt.

It IS disconcerting that enough ice melted that such a huge piece of it broke loose.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

From which article did you find statements indicating the event is a "naturally occurring one that has been happening for 1000s of years?" Please copy and paste the statements you feel establish that fact.

The fact of the matter is that I did read the linked article from the OP. I also read the linked article entitled "Ice shelf to Antarctica iceberg." In that article I found the following:

• Larsen C is the third massive ice shelf that’s broken off from the Antarctic Peninsula during the past 22 years:
  
  
  
  
  
  This year, sea ice around Antarctica was at its lowest level since scientists started continuously measuring it in 1979.
  
  
  
  
  (Notice that sea ice is differently colored from ice shelf ice. Why? Because ice shelves, though they are floating, are attached to the land, whereas sea ice is not.)
  
  On Feb. 13, in the midst of summer, Antarctic sea ice covered a total of 6.26 million square miles. That’s 790,000 square miles less than the average from 1981 to 2010 or equivalent to a chunk of ice larger than Mexico.

Within that there is nothing providing a sound basis for one to infer that the calving of chucks of ice that in total exceed the size of Mexico has been going on for thousands of years.

In that same article is found the following graphic.

What is reasonable to infer from that graphic is that it took thousands of years for one-third of a mile tall/deep Delaware-sized areas of ice to form the former Larsen C ice shelf. A quick check of Antarctic average total precipitation reveals that it's about 6.5 inches. Using nothing but arithmetic, one finds that amounts to 3200+ years of precipitation, and that is clearly an underestimation of the actual years it takes because the precipitation that falls is snow and ice is compacted snow, which means it takes longer than 3200 yeas for 1760 feet of ice to result from thousands of years of 6.5 inches of freshly fallen fluffy snow.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

If that were so, perhaps your buddy, Weatherman, who also doesn't know what he's talking about, perhaps would not have written the following:

That didn't take long at all.

I wrote "perhaps" because irrational, delusional and generally ignorant folks are as likely to say "A" as they are "the opposite of A."​

More importantly, were that so, the source article might not report, "Ice shelves are permanent floating sheets of ice connected to a landmass, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center." Clearly the are only as permanently attached as is the cold weather that inhibits ice melt.

Here is some comfort for you- I know you want this event to be further "evidence" (as if there is any) of AGW, BUT ITS NOT! You want a cited reference that calving is a natural process and has been going on for 1000's of years? Why don't you quote a source that says ice bergs are a new phenomenon created by AGW? Where do you think ice bergs come from? Honestly, some people have no common sense at all.

What Does the Antarctic Ice Shelf Break Really Mean?
We’ve been surprised by the level of interest in what may simply be a rare but natural occurrence. Because, despite the media and public fascination, the Larsen C rift and iceberg “calving” is not a warning of imminent sea level rise, and any link to climate change is far from straightforward. This event is, however, a spectacular episode in the recent history of Antarctica’s ice shelves, involving forces beyond the human scale, in a place where few of us have been, and one which will fundamentally change the geography of this region.

The concern is that the Larsen iceshelf has been slowing/preventing glacial calving directly into the ocean. Now that iceshelf is pretty much kaflooey. Glaciers move slowly, but inexorably toward the sea. It will no doubt be many years before calving along what used to be the Larsen iceshelf contributes to sea level rise. But it certainly will.
If the weather weren't warmer, would the iceshelf have broken away in the past 30 years? Who knows? Warmer weather certainly had something to do with it, though, and human burning of fossil fuels has contributed to the warmer weather. Only very very rich people with their fortunes entwined with fossil fuels need to pretend the human contribution to global warming doesn't exist. Unfortunately, the Republicans took it on as a political agenda item and now we've got the inaccurate "fake news" propaganda going around to support ignoring scientific fact. The Republicans should have kept out of it.

I agreed with everything right up to ...human burning fossil fuels has contributed to warmer weather.

I have an engineering degree, and I bristle every time I hear " the science is settled" with regard to global warming. We are discussing climate NOT WEATHER! And science by nature is never settled. Climate is one of the most complicated systems to grasp, it has thousands of variables, and is a relatively young science. Discussing climate in terms of years or decades is like discussing the distance from earth to the sun in inches. It is the wrong scale. So when people say we are warming now than we were in 1850 (near the end of the Little Ice Age) and conclude that man has caused that effect, they are either unaware of the true science, or are motivated to promote false science. Anthropogenic Global Warming fear will end, it will be a discussed in history in terms of the Salem Whitch trials, the Dutch Tulip Bulb mania and the blaming of Jews for the Black Plague. In the meantime, those of us with our feet firmly planted on the ground, and our heads not in the clouds will continue to obstruct the advancement of the AGW myth.

 

[BuckToothMoron]

This means penguin immigrants to South America. I wonder how fast it will float. If the penguins go fishing, will they be able to find "home" when they return, or will it have floated away?
It WILL be interesting to know how long it takes to melt.

It IS disconcerting that enough ice melted that such a huge piece of it broke loose.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

From which article did you find statements indicating the event is a "naturally occurring one that has been happening for 1000s of years?" Please copy and paste the statements you feel establish that fact.

The fact of the matter is that I did read the linked article from the OP. I also read the linked article entitled "Ice shelf to Antarctica iceberg." In that article I found the following:

• Larsen C is the third massive ice shelf that’s broken off from the Antarctic Peninsula during the past 22 years:
  
  
  
  
  
  This year, sea ice around Antarctica was at its lowest level since scientists started continuously measuring it in 1979.
  
  
  
  
  (Notice that sea ice is differently colored from ice shelf ice. Why? Because ice shelves, though they are floating, are attached to the land, whereas sea ice is not.)
  
  On Feb. 13, in the midst of summer, Antarctic sea ice covered a total of 6.26 million square miles. That’s 790,000 square miles less than the average from 1981 to 2010 or equivalent to a chunk of ice larger than Mexico.

Within that there is nothing providing a sound basis for one to infer that the calving of chucks of ice that in total exceed the size of Mexico has been going on for thousands of years.

In that same article is found the following graphic.

What is reasonable to infer from that graphic is that it took thousands of years for one-third of a mile tall/deep Delaware-sized areas of ice to form the former Larsen C ice shelf. A quick check of Antarctic average total precipitation reveals that it's about 6.5 inches. Using nothing but arithmetic, one finds that amounts to 3200+ years of precipitation, and that is clearly an underestimation of the actual years it takes because the precipitation that falls is snow and ice is compacted snow, which means it takes longer than 3200 yeas for 1760 feet of ice to result from thousands of years of 6.5 inches of freshly fallen fluffy snow.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

If that were so, perhaps your buddy, Weatherman, who also doesn't know what he's talking about, perhaps would not have written the following:

That didn't take long at all.

I wrote "perhaps" because irrational, delusional and generally ignorant folks are as likely to say "A" as they are "the opposite of A."​

More importantly, were that so, the source article might not report, "Ice shelves are permanent floating sheets of ice connected to a landmass, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center." Clearly the are only as permanently attached as is the cold weather that inhibits ice melt.

Here is some comfort for you- I know you want this event to be further "evidence" (as if there is any) of AGW, BUT ITS NOT! You want a cited reference that calving is a natural process and has been going on for 1000's of years? Why don't you quote a source that says ice bergs are a new phenomenon created by AGW? Where do you think ice bergs come from? Honestly, some people have no common sense at all.

What Does the Antarctic Ice Shelf Break Really Mean?
We’ve been surprised by the level of interest in what may simply be a rare but natural occurrence. Because, despite the media and public fascination, the Larsen C rift and iceberg “calving” is not a warning of imminent sea level rise, and any link to climate change is far from straightforward. This event is, however, a spectacular episode in the recent history of Antarctica’s ice shelves, involving forces beyond the human scale, in a place where few of us have been, and one which will fundamentally change the geography of this region.

The concern is that the Larsen iceshelf has been slowing/preventing glacial calving directly into the ocean. Now that iceshelf is pretty much kaflooey. Glaciers move slowly, but inexorably toward the sea. It will no doubt be many years before calving along what used to be the Larsen iceshelf contributes to sea level rise. But it certainly will.
If the weather weren't warmer, would the iceshelf have broken away in the past 30 years? Who knows? Warmer weather certainly had something to do with it, though, and human burning of fossil fuels has contributed to the warmer weather. Only very very rich people with their fortunes entwined with fossil fuels need to pretend the human contribution to global warming doesn't exist. Unfortunately, the Republicans took it on as a political agenda item and now we've got the inaccurate "fake news" propaganda going around to support ignoring scientific fact. The Republicans should have kept out of it.

I agreed with everything right up to ...human burning fossil fuels has contributed to warmer weather.

I have an engineering degree, and I bristle every time I hear " the science is settled" with regard to global warming. We are discussing climate NOT WEATHER! And science by nature is never settled. Climate is one of the most complicated systems to grasp, it has thousands of variables, and is a relatively young science. Discussing climate in terms of years or decades is like discussing the distance from earth to the sun in inches. It is the wrong scale. So when people say we are warming now than we were in 1850 (near the end of the Little Ice Age) and conclude that man has caused that effect, they are either unaware of the true science, or are motivated to promote false science. Anthropogenic Global Warming fear will end, it will be a discussed in history in terms of the Salem Whitch trials, the Dutch Tulip Bulb mania and the blaming of Jews for the Black Plague. In the meantime, those of us with our feet firmly planted on the ground, and our heads not in the clouds will continue to obstruct the advancement of the AGW myth.

For those interested in proper climate scale, and relative cause and effect-

Earth’s obliquity and temperature over the last 20,000 years

 

[EvilCat Breath]

Global warming has always been a hoax. It is a good thing that we have President Trump to bring sanity to the discussion.

Research Team Slams Global Warming Data In New Report: "Not Reality... Totally Inconsistent With Credible Temperature Data" | Zero Hedge

 

[usmbguest5318]

It IS disconcerting that enough ice melted that such a huge piece of it broke loose.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

From which article did you find statements indicating the event is a "naturally occurring one that has been happening for 1000s of years?" Please copy and paste the statements you feel establish that fact.

The fact of the matter is that I did read the linked article from the OP. I also read the linked article entitled "Ice shelf to Antarctica iceberg." In that article I found the following:

• Larsen C is the third massive ice shelf that’s broken off from the Antarctic Peninsula during the past 22 years:
  
  
  
  
  
  This year, sea ice around Antarctica was at its lowest level since scientists started continuously measuring it in 1979.
  
  
  
  
  (Notice that sea ice is differently colored from ice shelf ice. Why? Because ice shelves, though they are floating, are attached to the land, whereas sea ice is not.)
  
  On Feb. 13, in the midst of summer, Antarctic sea ice covered a total of 6.26 million square miles. That’s 790,000 square miles less than the average from 1981 to 2010 or equivalent to a chunk of ice larger than Mexico.

Within that there is nothing providing a sound basis for one to infer that the calving of chucks of ice that in total exceed the size of Mexico has been going on for thousands of years.

In that same article is found the following graphic.

What is reasonable to infer from that graphic is that it took thousands of years for one-third of a mile tall/deep Delaware-sized areas of ice to form the former Larsen C ice shelf. A quick check of Antarctic average total precipitation reveals that it's about 6.5 inches. Using nothing but arithmetic, one finds that amounts to 3200+ years of precipitation, and that is clearly an underestimation of the actual years it takes because the precipitation that falls is snow and ice is compacted snow, which means it takes longer than 3200 yeas for 1760 feet of ice to result from thousands of years of 6.5 inches of freshly fallen fluffy snow.

Read the article and the other links. You'll calm down when you discover this is a naturally occurring event that has been happening for 1000's of years. Feel better?

If that were so, perhaps your buddy, Weatherman, who also doesn't know what he's talking about, perhaps would not have written the following:

That didn't take long at all.

I wrote "perhaps" because irrational, delusional and generally ignorant folks are as likely to say "A" as they are "the opposite of A."​

More importantly, were that so, the source article might not report, "Ice shelves are permanent floating sheets of ice connected to a landmass, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center." Clearly the are only as permanently attached as is the cold weather that inhibits ice melt.

Here is some comfort for you- I know you want this event to be further "evidence" (as if there is any) of AGW, BUT ITS NOT! You want a cited reference that calving is a natural process and has been going on for 1000's of years? Why don't you quote a source that says ice bergs are a new phenomenon created by AGW? Where do you think ice bergs come from? Honestly, some people have no common sense at all.

What Does the Antarctic Ice Shelf Break Really Mean?
We’ve been surprised by the level of interest in what may simply be a rare but natural occurrence. Because, despite the media and public fascination, the Larsen C rift and iceberg “calving” is not a warning of imminent sea level rise, and any link to climate change is far from straightforward. This event is, however, a spectacular episode in the recent history of Antarctica’s ice shelves, involving forces beyond the human scale, in a place where few of us have been, and one which will fundamentally change the geography of this region.

The concern is that the Larsen iceshelf has been slowing/preventing glacial calving directly into the ocean. Now that iceshelf is pretty much kaflooey. Glaciers move slowly, but inexorably toward the sea. It will no doubt be many years before calving along what used to be the Larsen iceshelf contributes to sea level rise. But it certainly will.
If the weather weren't warmer, would the iceshelf have broken away in the past 30 years? Who knows? Warmer weather certainly had something to do with it, though, and human burning of fossil fuels has contributed to the warmer weather. Only very very rich people with their fortunes entwined with fossil fuels need to pretend the human contribution to global warming doesn't exist. Unfortunately, the Republicans took it on as a political agenda item and now we've got the inaccurate "fake news" propaganda going around to support ignoring scientific fact. The Republicans should have kept out of it.

I agreed with everything right up to ...human burning fossil fuels has contributed to warmer weather.

I have an engineering degree, and I bristle every time I hear " the science is settled" with regard to global warming. We are discussing climate NOT WEATHER! And science by nature is never settled. Climate is one of the most complicated systems to grasp, it has thousands of variables, and is a relatively young science. Discussing climate in terms of years or decades is like discussing the distance from earth to the sun in inches. It is the wrong scale. So when people say we are warming now than we were in 1850 (near the end of the Little Ice Age) and conclude that man has caused that effect, they are either unaware of the true science, or are motivated to promote false science. Anthropogenic Global Warming fear will end, it will be a discussed in history in terms of the Salem Whitch trials, the Dutch Tulip Bulb mania and the blaming of Jews for the Black Plague. In the meantime, those of us with our feet firmly planted on the ground, and our heads not in the clouds will continue to obstruct the advancement of the AGW myth.

For those interested in proper climate scale, and relative cause and effect-

Earth’s obliquity and temperature over the last 20,000 years

View attachment 139186

OT:
Who are Josh and Javier?

 

[Roudy]

Massive iceberg nearly the size of Delaware breaks off Antarctica

Fascinating stuff. Sorry if already posted.

Not caused by "Climate Change" previously advertised as Global Warming. Will not raise water levels either. This is what the scientists have said.

 

[BuckToothMoron]

Global warming has always been a hoax. It is a good thing that we have President Trump to bring sanity to the discussion.

Research Team Slams Global Warming Data In New Report: "Not Reality... Totally Inconsistent With Credible Temperature Data" | Zero Hedge

Unfortunately, Trump has not been the level headed individual that is needed to squelch the myth, IMO.

 

[Weatherman2020]

Do you think sailors making the Drake Passage would not have noticed an iceberg the size of Delaware? The passage itself is only about 200 miles wide. I can assure you they's notice a block of ice the size of Delaware and it wouldn't have to be right in front of them for them to do so.

Who would have noticed one two weeks ago, Einstein?

Anyone who saw a chunk of ice the size of Delaware floating free in the water would have noticed it.

You can't see the iceberg from the course he took, dufus.

Calculate how far away an object 200 meters into the air can be for one to see it on the ocean while standing in the "crows nest" some 150-200 feet (my guess based on knowing that the main mast on my boat, which is considerably smaller than the Golden Hind, is reaches 70 feet) above sea level.

Dude, you are clueless. Save your theoretical calculations and deal with 3 doses of reality-

Reality 1-

International waters are 12 nautical miles (22.2 km; 13.8 mi) from shore. This is largely because when on a ship (or about the same vantage point above the surface on shore), you can see a ship breach the horizon at about the 12 mile mark. (Both you and the ship are above sea level/horizon.) Boat captains say, on average, you can see ships on the horizon or land at about 12 miles. Of course that assumes clear skies and no fog.

Reality 2-

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Reality 3-
The path of the ice berg can not be predicted, but if it follows the path of other calved bergs, it won't be passing thru Drakes Passage. Boats travel the passage generally would not want to go farther south than necessary. Sorry, you lost Big with this one.

View attachment 139160

Ice bergs get smaller as they move away from the ice shelf, and they break into pieces. There is no chance that a large ice berg would stay intact until it became visible from a ship passing thru the passage.

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

​

B-15, the largest ever recorded iceberg, calved off of Antarctica in 2000. It broke into smaller pieces, one of which was B-15J. B-15J was spotted ~1700 miles southeast of New Zealand. At that time, November 2011, it was ~12 miles across. By December 2011 it'd crumbled/melted to a few miles, not a few hundred feet, across. (1700 miles is about half the distance between New Zealand and Antarctica.)

"Until 2010, the largest iceberg in the Northern Hemisphere was seen near Baffin Island, Nunavut, in 1882. It was 8 miles long, 3.7 miles wide and 64 feet high." The point is that, yes, state-sized icebergs (BABs -- big ass 'bergs) break apart as they head into warmer waters, but one'd expect sailors, merchants, whalers, marine researchers, pilots, thrill seekers, explorers, etc. collectively to see many town/city sized ones had icebergs the size of states been breaking off "all the time" for thousands of years. ("Many" being appreciably more than than one or four since 1882.) And yet, what we've observed is that BABs and remnants of them have appeared in the past 20 or so years at a notably greater frequency -- every two to four years -- than they did between 1979 and 1997, during which period there was one.

Then there's the fact that such huge chunks of ice take literally several thousand years to form -- Larsen C took something in excess of 3200 years to form. For such BABs to calve off at the rate you suggest -- "all the time for thousands of years" -- there'd have to have been a hell of a lot more ice on the polar caps than has been recorded over the past centuries. That is to say, the Ross, Larsen, et al ice shelves would have to have been considerably larger than they were recorded as being. The rate you're suggesting is too fast for the ice to reform into new shelves and then re-calve as yet another BAB and hold constant the size of the shelf from which the BAB calved. (Geological evidence indicates that the last time Antarctica was ice free was 4000 BC, some 6000 years ago. Some argue that it was 9000 to 13000 years ago, even longer ago, not more recently.)

Iceberg A-38 broke off the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in 1998. It was the size of Connecticut. It broke in half in 2004.

And nothing happened