NASA scientists: over 2 trillion tons of ice has melted since 2003
January 2, 2009
New satellite data presented by NASA scientists shows the loss of an estimated 2 trillion tons of ice from Greenland, the Antarctic and the North Poll: proof positive of global warming's dramatic effects, they claimed.
"'More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA's GRACE satellite,' said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke, in a report by the Environmental News Network.
The Greenland melting, added Luthcke, appears to be accelerating.
One immediate effect of this progressive melting is a spike in the intensity and frequency of massive wildfires in the American West, according to one expert who says more than half of the region could be claimed by fire in the next century.
Tom Swetnam, a leading fire ecologist at the University of Arizona, told CBS's 60 Minutes that a temperature increase in the West of just one degree had contributed to a four-fold increase in fires in the area.
A 2007 study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Georgia Institute of Technology determined that global warming's effect on wind patterns and sea temperatures nearly doubled the number of hurricanes a year in the Atlantic Ocean over the past century.
