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Glacier research on a budget: Climate-change scientists track flow of water with low-tech tools: rubber duckies

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on November 24, 2008 at 6:06 am

From the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal:

Worried about climate change, many researchers are eager to learn how rising temperatures may be undermining Greenland’s ice cap, where, according to recent satellite measurements, glaciers are melting much faster than expected. Should Greenland’s 2.17 million square miles of ice ever melt completely, the water could raise sea level worldwide by 24 feet, swamping coastal cities that are home to millions of people.

As Behar, of California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, soon discovered, though, there isn’t much money for global warming experiments in Greenland.

Unfazed, he thought of one device that might survive such extremes at a cost his field expedition could afford — a $2 rubber duck.

Consequently, in August Behar and colleagues at the University of Colorado released 90 yellow rubber ducks into the melt water flowing down a chasm in the largest of Greenland’s 200 glaciers — the Jakobshavn Isbrae — which has been thinning rapidly since 1997. Each duck was imprinted with an e-mail address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward. If all goes well, Behar hopes that one day they will emerge 30 miles or so away at the glacier’s edge in the open water of Disko Bay near Ilulissat, bobbing brightly amid the icebergs north of the Arctic Circle, each one a significant clue to just how warming temperatures may speed the glacier’s slide to the sea.

In an era of billion-dollar telescopes and city-size particle accelerators, some scientists have to make do with tub toys. From Greenland’s glaciers to the Pacific main, researchers are tracking thousands of rubber ducks, beer bottles and wooden tops set adrift around the world to solve critical questions of oceanography, glaciology and global warming.

Read more on this story from the Louisville Courier-Journal by clicking here.

November 24, 2008 · Filed Under General Water Issues

Comments

One Response to “Glacier research on a budget: Climate-change scientists track flow of water with low-tech tools: rubber duckies”

David Coffin on November 24th, 2008 11:35 pm

Please do the math! According to Wikipedia:

Greenland HAS only 836,109 Sq miles of land.

85% is ice which equals 710,692 Sq miles
the ice is 1.2 miles thick which equals 881,258 cu miles. (Where does the 2.17 million come from? Is Wikipedia that far off???)

The Earth has 224,397,021 sq miles of water.

How can a melt of 881,258 cu miles of ice equal 24 feet of water over 224,397,021 sq miles of ocean?

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