Smoke from Arctic wildfires may have caused Greenland's record thaw

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Smoke from Arctic wildfires may have caused Greenland's record thaw

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 December 2012 14.25 GMT

The freak melt of the Greenland ice sheet last summer may have been forced by smoke from Arctic wildfires, new research suggests.

Satellite observations, due to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Friday, for the first time tracks smoke and soot particles from tundra wildfires over to Greenland.

Scientists have long known that soot blackens snow and ice, reducing its powers of reflectivity and making it more likely to melt under the sun.

But the satellite records, due to be presented by the Ohio State University geographer Jason Box, go a step further, picking up images of smoke over Greenland at the time of last summer's extreme melt.

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/07/greenland-ice-melting-arctic-wildfires

[peacebird]

1. Interesting. Artic wildfires released tons of co2, the black soot from fires attracted sun to ice

So instead of reflecting sun rays it absorbed them.


Fascinating, and totally horrifying at the same time.

[Yo_Mama]

3. In the 1970s, when they were worried about falling temps

There was an actual proposal to artificially darken the pole ice sheets. A change in albedo is one of the fastest ways to warm the earth's surface.

I also wonder if occasional burst of volcanic activity in the far north might not dump a lot of detritus on the ice sheets and produce temporary melts. Antarctica would be more vulnerable to this, because the rate of deposition of ice there is very low (very low precip) across most of the area.

[Neutrino_603]

2. Dark Snow Project

Also of related interest:
http://darksnowproject.org/

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