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Minds in Ablation Part Four: Minds in Ablation
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Copyright © 1998, 1999 by Sean Mewhinney (df736 at freenet.carleton.ca).
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Minds in Ablation

Charles Ginenthal managed to convince himself that the Greenland ice
sheet is melting away rapidly today. Explaining how he managed to do
this is a matter for abnormal psychology. All I can do is point out
the information available to him which he ignored or repressed, and
show how he quotes his sources selectively to give misleading
impressions.

Venture to the Arctic is a popular account of the British scientific
expedition to northeast Greenland, mounted in the early fifties.
Individual chapters written by members of the expedition describe
their researches. Referring to a study of the mass balance by H.
Lister, Ginenthal states, "Measurements on Greenland's northeastern
glaciers, carried out between 1952 and 1954, showed that they were
losing [and here begins his quotation] `nearly 100 gm./cm.^2 averaged
over the whole glacier surface for one year -- equivalent to a depth
of water of nearly one metre. Since all parts of the glacier showed a
greater loss of ice in one year than was compensated by accumulation
of snow, the whole of the glacier is said to be in the ablation
area'." He then correctly comments: "The ablated ice is replaced by
ice farther in, toward the center of the Greenland ice cap." ^1 But
apparently he doesn't understand his own comment. Where his quotation
ends, the next sentence of Lister's report continues: "At a height of
1,000 m. (3,300 ft) the total accumulation of snow during the year
melted (and evaporated etc.) completely; i.e. the supply exactly
balanced the wastage."

Ginenthal makes it superabundantly clear that he understands the
quoted statement to mean that the whole of northeast Greenland, which
he then extends to all of Greenland, was melting away at a rate of a
meter a year.

Velikovsky was a master of the out-of-context quote. Velikovskian
writers continue to follow his example. If you crop it judiciously,
the technique is perfect for confusing the meaning of a single key
word or phrase, which can then be used as the opening wedge to a
massive misunderstanding. The key word here is "glacier". Ginenthal
takes it to be synonymous with the ice sheet. In context, Lister's
meaning is so clear that to misread him so is more in the nature of
delinquency than inadvertence -- even in a fool.

In his introduction, Lister states the questions he set out to answer,
including: "What is the state of the balance-sheet of glaciers that
flow from the huge Greenland ice-sheet?" ^2 You have to know the
topography. Most of the work of the expedition was carried out at its
base camp on a lake called Britannia So in Dronning Louise Land. This
is an area of bare mountains surrounded by ice, about 50 miles from
the sea, where glacier tongues spill between peaks and terminate on
barren ground. In other words, it's on the edge of the ice sheet. The
expedition set up stations here in the ablation zone on two of these
glacier tongues. Lister describes them: "The Britannia Gletscher [the
Danish spelling is used] is about ten miles long and six miles
wide.... The Admiralty Gletscher is twenty-five miles long, [and] has
an average width of two and a half miles..." ^3 Maps are included.
This is what Lister means by "the glacier" in Ginenthal's quotation.
The detailed figures for each glacier are given in a table on page
176.

This was only half of the study. The other half was conducted far
inland, where it is far higher and much colder, and there is virtually
no ablation, along a traverse to Thule on the west coast. Stakes were
set out at intervals to measure the depth of snow accumulation.

Extrapolating from their measurements on Britannia and Admiralty
glaciers, Lister estimated ablation in all of Dronning Louise Land at
4.7 cubic kilometers water equivalent of ice per year. For the area of
the inland ice sheet drained by the glaciers of this area, he
estimated annual accumulation at 4.5 cubic kilometers, extrapolating
from the stake measurements. He concluded: "our estimates of area,
ablation, and accumulation may well be about 10 per cent in error, but
they indicate that in this area of north-east Greenland a state of
approximate balance exists." ^4

Were these passages illegible in Ginenthal's copy of Venture to the
Arctic, did he not read them, or is his brain in the ablation zone,
where annual information losses exceed gains?

Then there's the Forbes Magazine story, "Pat Epps' Excellent
Adventure," about the enthusiasts who melted a hole through the ice
sheet and lifted out a P-38 fighter plane that crash-landed in
southern Greenland in 1942. He quotes this description of ablation at
the site: "In mid-summer, with the sun melting a good deal of the
snowy surface, the glacier, Epps had told me, `was like a saturated
sponge on a kitchen counter.' The porous snowy top held lots of water,
and the excess water ran along the hard icy shelf toward the coast..."
^5 Ginenthal adds: "Of course, this dripping and migration of water is
occurring over the entire snow-firn layer of the Greenland glacier..."
^6

Why does he think so? No map of the crash site is given, but here's
the giveaway: To reach the downed airmen, a rescue team "traveled
aboard an ice-breaker to the nearest shore, then trekked eight miles
across the ice sheet." ^7 It was only eight miles from the edge of the
ice sheet. Of course there is melting there. But even so, it's not in
the ablation zone. To reach the airplanes, Epps and his fellow
adventurers had to dig through 80 meters of ice. Eighty meters of ice
accumulated there in the 50-odd years since the war. Go figure: If
this were the ablation zone, those planes would still be sitting on
the surface.

"Does this melting occur... say at Thule, northwest of the island
[sic], where ice is not expected to melt?", he asks. And why should it
not melt at Thule? Who is it that supposedly does not expect ice to
melt at Thule? Ships anchor there -- It's right on the coast!

"Icecaps in the northern hemisphere melt from the southern to the
northern ends because the southern region is warmer," he asserts, ex
vacuo. ^8 And on the next page: "Ice melts from the top or side,
downward and inward." ^9 He calls the northeast coast "the coldest
region of Greenland" and reasons that if there's melting there, the
whole ice sheet must be melting. These things might sound reasonable
off the top of one's head, but Ginenthal is making it up. It's worse
than that. He uses the words "ablation zone" or "ablation area" three
times in his text. He has no excuse for not knowing what it means.

I've been through all this before, in "Ice Cores and Common Sense."
The late Fred Hall was an inspirational figure to Ginenthal.
Velikovskians have a special inability to read a simple sentence in
plain language and understand it. In his "Solar System Studies,"
published in Aeon, ^10 Hall garbled a description of the ablation zone
given by U. Laroche at a scientific congress, ^11 among other things,
and claimed that the Greenland ice sheet was shrinking from the top
down. In an addendum to "Ice Cores and Common Sense" called "Saturnian
Juvenilia," I gave this description of the ablation process in
glaciers:

Loss of mass from a glacier is called "ablation". Four processes
are responsible: sublimation, runoff of meltwater, evaporation, and
calving of icebergs. Ablation from the Greenland ice sheet exceeds
accumulation only in a narrow strip near the coast called the
"ablation zone" (see Figures 1 and 2). Perhaps nine tenths of the
surface area of the ice sheet lie in the "accumulation zone", where
annual accumulation exceeds ablation. What little melting does take
place in the accumulation zone forms a crust or trickles downward
in the snow. It doesn't remain in the liquid state long enough to
go far. It is carried along very slowly toward the coast by the
motion of the ice beneath it. (See Fig. 3.) If the ice did not
move, it would get thicker and thicker, without limit. Available
information is neither complete nor accurate enough to permit a
reliable estimate of the mass balance of the ice sheet as a whole.

I'm not in love with my own words, but I think this is a pretty clear
and concise explanation of ablation. And I gave a picture of it. I
reproduced a map from a report by Carl Benson, ^12 together with a
cross-section of the various concentric zones of the ice sheet, with
explanatory captions. (Benson breaks the accumulation zone down
further into the "soaked facies", "percolation facies", and "dry snow
facies".) The boundary line between the ablation zone and the
accumulation zone is the equilibrium line. It has a mean altitude of
about 950 meters in Greenland ^13 -- lower in the north, higher in the
southwest. ^14 Above the equilibrium line, accumulation exceeds
ablation. Below it, the balance is reversed. Since 87% of the ice
sheet is above 4,000 feet (1220 meters), ^15 it is evident that most
of it lies in the accumulation zone. ^16 Ice builds up slowly over a
large area in the interior and flows outward to the edges, where it
melts or breaks away as icebergs in a few days of summer, essentially.

Ice sheets melt from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Glaciologists had this figured out early in the nineteenth century. As
C. Leroy Ellenberger put it, "Anyone who has skied Hawaii or Chile
should have no problem understanding how high-altitude arctic ice
survived... the Hypsithermal" warming. ^17 Ice sheets don't melt from
south to north, either. Ablation is greater in southern Greenland, but
so is accumulation. You can see this from maps, too. ^18

Ginenthal has the idea that the northern coast is the coldest part of
Greenland. He's dead wrong. In December of 1952, the temperature at
Britannia So, where Lister made his ablation measurements, averaged
46° F warmer than at the expedition's meteorological station at
Northice, in the interior. ^19 This is because temperature is much
more closely correlated with altitude than latitude. Ginenthal could
have learned that from one of his sources. He cited Robin's Climatic
Record in Polar Ice Sheets ^20 for the rather trivial piece of
information that much of the Greenland ice sheet does not meet Robin's
strict definition of a polar glacier as one where the surface never
reaches melting point. The very next paragraph on that page invites
him to look at a map of temperature and elevation, where "We see that
temperature is primarily related to surface elevation." (See Fig. 4.)
Robin's book is a good general introduction to glaciology with much
useful information that would have benefited him.

Rather than rely on Ginenthal's cockup of one forty-year-old study of
mass balance in one part of Greenland, it might be interesting to look
at recent developments in the state of glaciologists' knowledge of the
ice-sheet balance. In 1985, Reeh and Gundestrup estimated that the ice
at Dye 3 in southern Greenland was thickening at a rate of 3
centimeters a year, with a range of error of plus or minus 6
centimeters. ^21

They had the use of surveys of accumulation and ice flow both above
and below the drill site. They noted that previous studies at various
other locations, lacking precise information, had indicated larger
imbalances, sometimes amounting to more than a meter a year, "in some
cases positive, in others negative." ^22 They add: "The suggested
thickening rates of a few centimetres per year for the interior ice-
sheet regions, however, do not necessarily mean that the Greenland ice
sheet as a whole is at present gaining mass. Observations from the
ice-sheet margin in West Greenland indicate that in general this part
of the ice sheet is thinning and receding...... almost nothing is
known about the mass balance of the eastern and northern parts of the
ice sheet." ^23 (The ice could easily be thickening in the center and
receding at the margins, because both abalation and accumulation
increase with higher temperatures.)

Three years later Kostecka and Whillans published a study of the
balance along two east-west transects across Greenland. For the OSU
transect, which passes through Dye 3 at about 65° N, they found an
annual increase of 60 centimeters, plus or minus 14 cm. For the EGIG
line, which passes through Summit at about 70° N, they found a
steady-state balance, with an uncertainty of plus or minus 7
centimeters. ^24

In 1989, Ambach noted that "Most estimates of the present mass balance
of the Greenland ice sheet suggest that gains and losses are about
equal." ^25 And in 1991, Oerlemans expressed the opinion that "early
estimates only give an idea of the characteristic mass turnover of the
ice sheet, but certainly not of the sign of the net balance." ^26

We are now entering an era where it will be possible to measure net
mass changes over the whole ice sheet by radar altimetry from
satellites. The error in individual measurements of altitude can be as
much as several meters, but statistical analysis of successive
passages over the same point makes it possible to detect trends. There
have been two analyses of the altimetry data available from three
American satellites: Zwally et al. found an annual elevation increase
of 23 centimeters between 1978 and 1985 over the southern half of
Greenland, ^27 while Lingle et al. found no significant change between
1978 and 1987. ^28 It has been questioned whether this is a real
effect. ^29 If it is, observations over a longer period are still
needed to interpret the results. Knowing how much the surface rose or
fell in a short interval does not distinguish whether the gain or loss
is ice, or a short-term fluctuation in snowfall, with half the density
of ice. A satellite in polar orbit will be needed to provide coverage
of the whole Greenland ice sheet.

As part of its preparations for launch of a laser altimetry satellite,
NASA has been conducting laser altimetry from aircraft over transects
of southern Greenland. Comparison of their measurements with the
earlier satellite radar data indicates a thickening of as much as 2
meters in the southwest between 1980 and 1993. ^30

Quite considerable precision can be achieved, at least for a few
selected locations, using global positioning system satellites. Radio
receivers have recently been planted at a few sites in Greenland for
mass-balance studies. ^31 To avoid the problem of interpreting
short-term changes in surface elevation, the receivers are buried 20
meters deep.

This brief survey should suffice to show that Ginenthal's fantasy of
the ice sheet wasting away at the rate of a meter a year has no basis
in fact. Now we return to that fantasy.

The Magic Figure

(In Which Ginenthal Discovers a Most Interesting Result)

This is where Ginenthal presents his calculations proving that the
Greenland ice sheet must have completely melted away during the
hypsithermal. Ginenthal derives a figure of 1.5 meters of ice melted
away each year, which he assures us is a very conservative figure, and
simply multiplies it by the 5500 years which he assigns to the
hypsithermal. Since the result is greater than the thickness of the
ice sheet, Ginenthal feels that he can afford to be generous, and
reduces this to half a meter a year.

The first meter of Ginenthal's magic figure, of course, is Lister's
measurement of ablation in Dronning Louise Land, with no allowance for
snowfall. The other half a meter was lifted straight out of a passage
in Petr Borisov's Can Man Change the Climate?, with no regard for the
context:

It has been calculated that, as a result of the melting of the sea
ice, eight times as much heat is absorbed from solar radiation by
the Arctic Basin as is necessary to reduce the thickness of the
continental ice at the rate of 0.5 m a year. ^32

The ice he was interested in melting was sea ice, not continental ice.
But the energy required (the heat of fusion) is about the same, in
spite of the salt content and a lower melting point. Back in the
sixties and seventies, Borisov was pushing a scheme to melt the Arctic
ice pack by pumping water out through the Bering strait, in a massive
hydroengineering project to improve the Siberian climate.The actual
figures used by Borisov are given 73 pages later, in a table on page
108 of his book. ^33 Ginenthal just slaps Lister's meter together with
Borisov's half a meter, and off he goes:

If we accept these calculations as reasonable, since one reflects
what was measured at Greenland, and apply them to the Greenland
icecap during the hipsithermal [sic], we discover a most
interesting result: the Greenland icecap would have melted away
completely. ^34

Ginenthal's use of this passage shows a couple of interesting things.
First, he has no grasp of his sources, and often leaps from one
conclusion to another without any intervening reasoning process. To
get from the radiant heat absorbed by an ice-free ocean to a specific
figure of melting on the Greenland ice sheet, first you have to
calculate how much net energy will be transferred to the air over the
Arctic basin, and how it will be distributed by atmospheric
circulation. Newson and Warshaw and Rapp would seem to have done this
part of the work for him, except that their results are presented as
annual, not seasonal averages, but he does not refer to them again.
Then you need a realistic model of accumulation and ablation in
Greenland to show the effect of increased atmospheric temperatures.
All the intermediate steps are missing. It's not that the specific
figure of half a meter for hypsithermal melting is too high or too
low; it's just completely arbitrary.

But the really funny thing about it is that if the Greenland ice sheet
is melting away today at the rate of a meter a year, Ginenthal doesn't
need the hypsithermal at all to do the job. All the confused, labored
arguments over hypsithermal warmth, all the misrepresentations of
botanical evidence are completely beside the point. You get the
feeling that Ginenthal doesn't understand his own argument.

How Stable is the Ice Sheet?

Serious people have considered how the stability of the Greenland ice
sheet might be affected by global warming. Interestingly, in the 1926
edition of Climate Through the Ages, Brooks wrote: "Of course,
Greenland and the Antarctic continent did not become ice-free during
this short period..." (the hypsithermal). ^35 Once it reaches a
certain elevation, a large ice sheet largely creates its own climate.
Cold downdrafts ("katabatic winds") blow outward from above, cooling
the margins of the ice sheet. Both accumulation and ablation increase
with temperature. Throughout a considerable range of temperature,
these changes more or less keep pace with each other. But beyond a
certain point, ablation will outpace accumulation, and the ice sheet
will shrink rapidly. It takes a long time for an ice sheet to adjust
to a change in climatic regime. In recent years, computer modelling
has been used by several researchers to assess the long-term effects
of warming.

All of the following studies have terms to represent isostatic
adjustment of the bedrock topography, geothermal heat flux, and
differences in the rheology of ice of different age and temperature.
The model used by Letréguilly et al. (1991) ^36 has a
20-kilometer-square geographic grid and 14 vertical layers.
Accumulation rates are adjusted for changes in annual temperature.
Ablation is a function of summer temperatures ("positive degree
days"). The time step is two years.

Letréguilly and her co-authors found that the effects of a 2° C
warming on the ice sheet model were hardly detectable. With a 4-degree
warming, an ice-free corridor opens up between about 65 and 66 degrees
north latitude, and "the ice sheet ... splits up into two parts, one
large part covering central and northern Greenland, and a much smaller
ice cap over the southern mountains." ^37

"The ice sheet is only moderately vulnerable to a climate warming:
it would take a temperature increase of 6°, sustained over 20 000
years, to allow the ice sheet to disappear completely.....
Furthermore, under present-day climatic conditions, if the ice
sheet did not already exist, it would re-form on the ice-free
Greenland topography." ^38

Abe-Ouchi (1993) modelled a two-dimensional transect through the ice
sheet along the EGIG survey line in central Greenland. The ice is
assumed to flow along this line. The model has a horizontal grid of 10
to 20 kilometers, and 92 vertical layers. Time steps for ice-sheet
geometry and temperature vary from 0.2 to 2 years. Ablation is a
function of equilibrium-line altitude and summer temperatures.

Abe-Ouchi's model shows greater vulnerability to warming than
Letréguilly's. With a "3 to 4° C increase of the summer months' free
atmospheric temperature in the region of 70° N... the ice in the
central part of the Greenland ice sheet rapidly disintegrates. Once
the drastic retreat starts, the ice sheet will retreat toward the
mountain range in East Greenland in about 10,000 years." ^39 However,
like Letréguilly and her collaborators, Abe-Ouchi finds that "the
present Greenland ice sheet is not only a remnant of the ice-age
climate but that it would even start growing in a warmer climate than
the present." ^40

The three-dimensional model of Fabré et al. (1995) is similar to that
of Letréguilly (who is one of Fabré's collaborators), but with
slightly coarser spatial and temporal resolution. It also differs in
incorporating an "orographic" correction term in the representation of
accumulation, which is allowed to increase with an increase in surface
slope. This factor "becomes more important for climate warming when a
large part or all of the ice sheet may disappear." ^41 Their
perturbation experiments were allowed to run for 50,000 model years.
Their ice-sheet model is quite robust -- with a seven-degree C
warming, the margins retreat substantially, but the ice sheet
survives. But when accumulation is not allowed to increase with
temperature (a deliberately unrealistic assumption) it splits into two
with a three-degree warming, and virtually disappears with a warming
of 5 degrees C.

Crowley and Baum (1995) do not treat ice-sheet decay at all. Their
model represents a Greenland surface bare of ice, coupled to a
general-circulation model of the atmosphere. The surface albedo is
adjusted for various types of vegetation cover. The geographic grid is
a coarse 4.5° latitude by 7.5° longitude, and the model is run for
only a few years. They find that once the ice sheet is removed, the
higher surface temperatures would not permit it to re-form. ^42

These theoretical studies generally indicate that the ice sheet could
withstand any warming it may have actually experienced during the
Hypsithermal interval. Ginenthal, however, maintains that it could not
have done so, and that the present Greenland ice sheet was created all
at once in a matter of a few days or weeks. Which brings us to the
Kerplop! Theory. But first, a word about early maps.
_________________________________________________________________

Notes

1. Ginenthal, the sentence following his note 59, citing H. Lister,
"Glaciology (1): The Balance Sheet or The Mass Balance," in R. A.
Hamilton, ed., Venture to the Arctic (Penguin, 1958), pp. 175-176.

2. Lister, op. cit., p. 168.

3. Ibid., op. cit., p. 169.

4. Ibid., op. cit., p. 188.

5. Terence Monmaney, "Pat Epps' Excellent Adventure," Forbes magazine
supplement FYI (March, 1994), p. 106. (Minor errors and editorial
liberties corrected.)

6. Ginenthal, "I.C.E.," Part V.

7. Montmaney, op. cit., p. 110.

8. Ginenthal, "I.C.E.," Part VI, third to last paragraph.

9. Ginenthal, "I.C.E.," Part VII.

10. Fred Hall, "Solar System Studies"(Part Two), Aeon Vol. 1, no. 4,
p. 34.

11. U. Laroche, "The Greenland Hydropower as a Source of Electrolytic
Hydrogen," Proceedings of the First World Hydrogen Energy Conference,
Vol. 3, p. 2C-34.

12. Carl S. Benson, "Stratigraphic Studies in the Snow and Firn of the
Greenland Ice Sheet," U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Snow, Ice, and
Permafrost Research Establishment Research Report 70 (July, 1962),
Fig. 48, "Diagenetic Facies of the Greenland Ice Sheet."

13. Cornelius J. Van der Veen, "Land Ice and Climate," in Kevin E.
Trenberth, ed., Climate System Modeling (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992),
p. 438.

14. J. Oerlemans, "The Mass Balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet:
Sensitivity to Climate Change as Revealed by Energy-Balance
Modelling," The Holocene Vol. 1, no. 1 (1991), pp. 43, 44.

15. P. Putnins, "The Climate of Greenland," in S. Orvig, ed., Climates
of the Polar Regions (Elsevier, 1970), p. 3.

16. According to Niels Reeh, 84% of the ice sheet is in the
accumulation zone. See "Dynamic and Climatic History of the Greenland
Ice Sheet," in R. J. Fulton, ed., Quaternary Geology of Canada and
Greenland (Geological Survey of Canada, 1989), p. 797. According to
Zwally, the figure is 85%. See H. Jay Zwally, "Growth of Greenland Ice
Sheet: Interpretation," Science Vol. 246 (Dec. 22, 1989), p. 1591.

17. C. Leroy Ellenberger, "The Ginenthal Factor," available on the web
at: ftp://ftp.primenet.com/pub/lippard/cle-talbott.

18. Benson, op. cit., Fig. 30, p. 40; Reeh, in Fulton, op. cit., Fig.
14.5, p. 801; G. de Q. Robin, "General Glaciology," in Robin, ed., The
Climatic Record in Polar Ice Sheets, (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983),
Fig. 4.4, p. 96.

19. R. A. Hamilton, "Meteorology," in Venture to the Arctic, p. 83.

20. Ginenthal, Part V, note 31, citing G. de Q. Robin, "Ice Sheets:
Isotopes and Temperatures," in Robin, ed., The Climatic Record in
Polar Ice Sheets (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983), p. 8.

21. Niels Reeh and Niels S. Gundestrup, "Mass Balance of the Greenland
Ice Sheet at Dye 3," Journal of Glaciology Vol. 31, no. 108 (1985), p.
198.

22. Ibid., op. cit., p. 199.

23. Ibid., op. cit., p. 200.

24. J. M. Kostecka and I. M. Whillans, "Mass Balance along Two
Transects of the West Side of the Greenland Ice Sheet," Journal of
Glaciology Vol. 34, no. 116 (1988), pp. 31-39.

25. W. Ambach, "Effects of Climatic Perturbations on the
Surface-Ablation Regime of the Greenland Ice Sheet, west Greenland,"
Journal of Glaciology Vol. 35, no. 121 (1989), p. 315.

26. J. Oerlemans, op. cit., p. 41.

27. H. Jay Zwally, Anita C. Brenner, Judy A. Major, Robert A.
Bindschadler, and James G. Marsh, "Growth of Greenland Ice Sheet:
Measurement," Science Vol. 246 (Dec. 22, 1989), pp. 1587-1589, and on
pp. 1589-1591 of the same issue, H. Jay Zwally, "Growth of Greenland
Ice Sheet: Interpretation."

28. C. S. Lingle, A. C. Brenner, H. J. Zwally, and J. P. DiMarzio,
"Multi-Year Elevation Changes Near the West Margin of the Greenland
Ice Sheet from Satellite Radar Altimetry," in Proceedings of the
International Conference on the Role of the Polar Regions in Global
Change (Univ. of Alaska, 1991) Vol. I, pp. 35-42.

29. C. J. Van der Veen, "Interpretation of Short-Term Ice-Sheet
Elevation Changes Inferred from Satellite Altimetry," Climatic Change
Vol 23 (1993), pp. 383-405; Roger J. Braithwaite, "Is the Greenland
Ice Sheet Getting Thicker?," guest editorial, Climatic Change Vol. 23
(1993), pp. 379-381.

30. "Program for Arctic Regional Climate Assessment," Arctic Research
of the United States Vol. 10 (Spring/Summer, 1996), p. 59.

31. I. Whillans, "Mass Balance of Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets,"
Ice, no. 110 (1st issue, 1996), p. 16.

32. Ginenthal's note 50, citing Petr Borisov, Can Man Change the
Climate?, (Moscow, Progress, 1973), p. 35.

33. Borisov, Table 7, p. 108. It's an estimated annual energy budget
for the Arctic Ocean, at present, and in a hypothetical ice-free
state. The figures are given in kilocalories per square centimeter.
Ignoring all terms except those for reflected and black-body
radiation, Borisov finds a gain of 38.5 kilocalories if the ice is
removed. Whether this is sufficient to keep it from refreezing depends
on the values of the other terms. The heat of fusion for water is
about 80 calories per gram. Fifty cubic centimeters of ice weigh about
46 grams. How much heat it takes to melt it depends on the temperature
of the ice. At freezing point, it takes 3680 calories. Dividing 38,500
by 8, we get 4812.5 -- enough to melt through 65 cubic centimeters of
ice at freezing point, or 50 cubic centimeters at minus 24.6 degrees
Celsius.

34. Ginenthal, last paragraph of Part VI.

35. C. E. P. Brooks, op. cit., (N.Y., Coleman, 1926), p. 411.

36. Anne Letréguilly, Philippe Huybrechts, and Niels Reeh,
"Steady-State Characteristics of the Greenland Ice Sheet under
Different Climates," Journal of Glaciology Vol. 37, no. 125 (1991),
pp. 153-154.

37. Ibid., op. cit., p. 156.

38. Ayako Abe-Ouchi, "Ice-Sheet Response to Climate Changes: A
Modelling Approach," Zürcher Geographische Schriften Vol 54 (1993), p.
127.

39. Ibid., op. cit., p. 79.

40. Adeline Fabré, Anne Letréguilly, Catherine Ritz and Anne Mangeney,
"Greenland under Changing Climates: Sensitivity Experiments with a New
Three-Dimensional Ice-Sheet Model," Annals of Glaciology Vol. 21
(1995), p. 2.

41. Thomas J. Crowley and Steven K. Baum, "Is the Greenland Ice Sheet
Bistable?," Paleoceanography Vol. 10, no. 3 (June, 1995), pp. 357-363.

42. Ibid., op. cit., p. 358.
_________________________________________________________________

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