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Jason Box is a cryoscientist, specifically a professor in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
Box is running a crowd-sourced study of the diminishing albedo of the Greenland ice cap called Dark Snow.
There's a big article on Slate -- here's an excerpt:
"The ice in Greenland this year isn’t just a little dark—it’s record-setting dark. Box says he’s never seen anything like it. I spoke to Box by phone earlier this month, just days after he returned from his summer field research campaign.
“I was just stunned, really,” Box told me.
The photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more quickly."
Yeah, this is ice and snow -- underneath all of the soot.
This is what positive feedbacks do, and what many or even most scientists and models don't take into consideration -- let alone the average person who wonders if we might make it out of this century with our civilization intact.
“In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.”
Did you get that? The soot from the wildfires along with the grit from blown sands and dessicated soils has darkened the snow and ice of Greenland so much that it is absorbing more energy than we can possibly refrain from emitting.
Which gives depth to Box's recent tweet, on hearing about the SWERUSC-C3 findings:
Box is running a crowd-sourced study of the diminishing albedo of the Greenland ice cap called Dark Snow.
There's a big article on Slate -- here's an excerpt:
"The ice in Greenland this year isn’t just a little dark—it’s record-setting dark. Box says he’s never seen anything like it. I spoke to Box by phone earlier this month, just days after he returned from his summer field research campaign.
“I was just stunned, really,” Box told me.
The photos he took this summer in Greenland are frightening. But their implications are even more so. Just like black cars are hotter to the touch than white ones on sunny summer days, dark ice melts much more quickly."
Yeah, this is ice and snow -- underneath all of the soot.
This is what positive feedbacks do, and what many or even most scientists and models don't take into consideration -- let alone the average person who wonders if we might make it out of this century with our civilization intact.
“In 2014 the ice sheet is precisely 5.6 percent darker, producing an additional absorption of energy equivalent with roughly twice the US annual electricity consumption.”
Did you get that? The soot from the wildfires along with the grit from blown sands and dessicated soils has darkened the snow and ice of Greenland so much that it is absorbing more energy than we can possibly refrain from emitting.
Which gives depth to Box's recent tweet, on hearing about the SWERUSC-C3 findings: