Ministers get close look at Antarctic ice threat
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
TROLL RESEARCH STATION, Antarctica, Feb 23 (AP): A parka-clad band of environment ministers landed in this remote corner of the icy continent Monday, in the final days of an intense season of climate research, to learn more about how a melting Antarctica may endanger the planet.
Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the US, China, Britain and Russia, were to rendezvous at a Norwegian research station with American and Norwegian scientists coming in on the last leg of a 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometre), two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.
The visitors will gain "hands-on experience of the colossal magnitude of the Antarctic continent and its role in global climate change," said the mission's organiser, Norway's Environment Ministry.
They'll also learn about the great uncertainties plaguing research into this southernmost continent and its link to global warming: How much is Antarctica warming? How much ice is melting into the sea? How high might it raise ocean levels worldwide?
The answers are so elusive that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. scientific network, excluded the potential threat from the polar ice sheets from calculations in its authoritative 2007 assessment of global warming.
The IPCC forecast that oceans may rise up to 23 inches (0.59 metres) this century, from heat expansion and melting land ice, if the world does little to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for atmospheric warming.
Representatives from more than a dozen nations, including the US, China, Britain and Russia, were to rendezvous at a Norwegian research station with American and Norwegian scientists coming in on the last leg of a 1,400-mile (2,300-kilometre), two-month trek over the ice from the South Pole.
The visitors will gain "hands-on experience of the colossal magnitude of the Antarctic continent and its role in global climate change," said the mission's organiser, Norway's Environment Ministry.
They'll also learn about the great uncertainties plaguing research into this southernmost continent and its link to global warming: How much is Antarctica warming? How much ice is melting into the sea? How high might it raise ocean levels worldwide?
The answers are so elusive that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. scientific network, excluded the potential threat from the polar ice sheets from calculations in its authoritative 2007 assessment of global warming.
The IPCC forecast that oceans may rise up to 23 inches (0.59 metres) this century, from heat expansion and melting land ice, if the world does little to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for atmospheric warming.