For those who follow the opinions and perspectives of West OC Representative Dana Rohrabacher, his comments about a just released NASA funded UCI study of Antarctic ice flows might be surprising.
“This is one fine example of the science we can do with space-based systems,” Rohrabacher told OC180NEWS, “which will become much more prevalent as we reduce the cost of access to space through commercial ventures.”
NASA-funded researchers at UCI have created the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica. The map, which shows glaciers flowing thousands of miles from the continent’s deep interior to its coast, will be critical for tracking future sea-level increases from climate change, according to an August 18 NASA statement.
The map itself does not provide any new information directly linked to global warming, but that is in the next steps.
“In principal, the project itself does not deal with global warming,” Associate Project Scientist Bernd Scheuchl, who is also a staff Scientist at UCI, told OC180NEWS. “They now have one more piece of information they can use. It will be useful for people who deal with aspects of global warming for modeling.”
The team created the map using integrated radar observations from a consortium of international satellites. They used billions of data points captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites to weed out cloud cover, solar glare and land features masking the glaciers. With the aid of NASA technology, the team painstakingly pieced together the shape and velocity of glacial formations, including the previously uncharted East Antarctica, which comprises 77 percent of the continent.
“The fact that we were able to pool scientific resources with our international allies (CSA, ESA, and JAXA) to create this map shows that international collaboration can and will lead to better exploration, discovery, and science,” Rep. Rohrabacher
Told OC180NEWS. “We should continue to encourage international participation between freedom-loving nations in science and space missions.”
Well, that’s a much more positive perspective on a NASA climate change project than we got the last time we asked Rep. Rohrabacher for his comments on such a project.
“With last week’s reports about NASA GISS and NOAA cherry-picking data, Dr. Hansen’s known bias, and the world in a global freeze, it is hard for me to understand how these alarmists expect people to continue believing in man-made global warming with their inaccurate instruments, faulty computer models, and fraudulent numbers,” Rep. Rohrabacher wrote in a January 21, 2010 email to OC180NEWS.
See our related article below. This is not to suggest Rohrabacher has suddenly done an about face on NASA or anything global warming related.
“The new information about ice flows in the Antarctic, which completely turns the existing models on their heads, fills in information gaps and shows that we still have a great deal to learn about how all the various components of our natural environment interact,” Rohrabacher told OC180NEWS. “It further shows that we should not try to create multi-trillion dollar policy decisions based on such developing scientific models and incomplete information.”
Study author Scheuchl might agree with Rohrabacher that his study fills in some important information gaps, but to suggest the new work “completely turns the existing models on their heads” might be going a little far.
“One of the next steps that we are approaching is to look at previous results and see that if by adding information from our maps you can improve some of the previous results,” Scheuchl told OC180NEWS. “Particularly in Western Antarctica, more ice is melting than is accumulating. That has been shown by several independent studies, using independent methods, to establish that fact. We [can now] refine those results and give them more accurate estimates on how much mass Antarctica is losing.”
Scheuchl’s team discovered a new ridge splitting the 5.4 million-square-mile landmass from east to west. They also found unnamed formations moving up to 800 feet annually across immense plains sloping toward the Antarctic Ocean and in a different manner than past models of ice migration.
“The map points out something fundamentally new: that ice moves by slipping along the ground it rests on,” said Thomas Wagner, NASA’s cryospheric program scientist in Washington. “That’s critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior.”
The work was conducted in conjunction with the International Polar Year (IPY) (2007-2008). Collaborators worked under the IPY Space Task Group, which included NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the Alaska Satellite Facility in Fairbanks, and MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates of Richmond, British Columbia, Canada.
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About Dolores Barr, Publisher
Dolores Barr has lived in Rossmoor since 1992 and has created this site to provide local news for the people of Los Alamitos, Seal Beach, Rossmoor, Leisure World, Sunset Beach, and Surfside, California. My husband and I have had two students graduate from the Los Alamitos Unified School District and currently our Grandson, Ricky Apodaca, grade 3 at Weaver Elementary, is actively involved in youth baseball through LAYB and youth football through FNL.
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