Same-sex marriage prompts conservatives to mobilize (Star Tribune)

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Warm water threatens vast Anatarctic ice shelf

A new study indicates that a large ice sheet is at risk. Warm water from below is causing it to melt.

Scientists are predicting the disappearance of another vast ice shelf in Antarctica by the end of the century that will accelerate rising sea levels.

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The Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf fringing the Weddell Sea on the eastern side of Antarctica has so far not seen ice loss from global warming and much of the observation of melting has focused on the western side of the continent around the Amundsen Sea. But new research from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany says the 450,000-sq-km ice shelf is under threat.

"According to our calculations, this protective barrier will disintegrate by the end of this century," said Dr Harmut Hellmer, lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature this week.

The huge ice shelves that float on the seas fringing Antarctica provide a buffer against warming waters eating away at the base of the much larger glaciers behind them that sit on the land.

"Ice shelves are like corks in the bottles for the ice streams behind them," said Hellmer. "They reduce the ice flow.

"If, however, the ice shelves melt from below, they become so thin that the dragging surfaces become smaller and the ice behind them starts to move."

Hellmer and his team predict the melting of the Filchner-Ronne shelf could add up to 4.4 mm per year to rising global sea levels.

According to the latest estimates based on remote sensing data, global sea levels rose 1.5 mm a year between 2003 and 2010 due to melting glaciers and ice shelves, the scientists say. This is on top of an estimated 1.7 mm annual rise due to the expansion of the oceans as the water warms.

Costly Sea Defences

The research was funded by the European Union's ?Ice2sea' program, set up in the wake of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that highlighted ice-sheets as the most significant remaining uncertainty in projections of rising sea levels. Projections from the Ice2sea project will feed into the fifth IPCC report due in 2013/2014.

It will also inform plans for major capital spending on sea defenses to protect Europe's coastlines, particularly areas of economic importance like London, with its tidal barrier on the River Thames, and the port of Rotterdam. A large part of the Netherlands is below sea level and protected by an elaborate system of dykes.

Professor David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, who heads the Ice2sea program, told Reuters the Alfred Wegener Institute's findings add to evidence that warming oceans are having the greatest impact on the ice sheets, as opposed to atmospheric changes or the legacy of some long-term change decades or even hundreds of years ago.

"What people need to know with a sense of urgency is what is going to happen to sea levels over the next few decades," said Vaughan. "In those terms, these results are very big news indeed."

Vaughan is cautious about precise projections of the impact on sea levels. "For me, those numbers are about what might be plausible," he said. "I think we need to do some more work with the ice sheet models to determine exactly what sea level rises we might expect, but those are plausible numbers."

All other things being equal, the polar ice sheets reach a balance where the amount of snow going in each year is broadly matched by the number of icebergs coming out, but subtle changes like those associated with global warming, can affect that balance quite rapidly.

Vaughan said there was clear evidence that the widely-reported disintegration of the Larsen A and Larsen B ice shelves in 1995 and 2002 respectively, had led to the ice sheets that fed them moving faster into the sea, some of them many times the rate seen before collapse.

The scientific focus on the melting ice in the Amundsen sea is down to the fact that this is where it is happening now, but Vaughan said although the Weddell

Sea is not seeing ice loss at the moment, the German research supports the view that it will spread to other areas.

If there is a lesson for climate scientists, it's "don't behave like the infant school football team and follow the ball," he said.

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Apple?s Lion Security Hole Could Be A Wider Issue Than Just FileVault?

As you may have seen over the weekend, someone has discovered a security hole in FileVault, which arose with the OS X Lion security update, version 10.7.3, back in February: FileVault encryption passwords are now visible in plain text outside of a computer's encrypted area. The hole was apparently spotted by someone back in February, although it was most publicly first pointed out by security consultant David Emery on the Cryptome blog a few days ago and the?rest of the blogosphere has run with it. Now, it appears that the problem could be bigger than previously thought: it turns out that the developer who first noticed the hole back in February has discovered that it exists outside of FileVault, too, with at least one other company's security encryption software, Lion VM, from VMWare Fusion, showing the same behavior.

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Trustfire F20 Cree LED Flashlight Review

A good torch is one of those essential things that every Gadgeteer has to own. I use mine every night to read by, and of course it’s always useful if you have a power outage or if you have to go outside to look for the cat ? When I travel overseas, there’s a few [...]

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Kickstarter talks to us about product 'pre-orders,' won't force refunds when creators flake

Kickstarter has proven an incredibly effective venue for connecting project creators with monetary support -- inventors pitch directly to consumers, indie filmmakers meet indie producers and food trucks get the financial push necessary to take their restaurants to the road. With the latter two, backers don't necessarily expect goods in return, save for an overvalued t-shirt, bumper sticker or film credit. When it comes to electronics, however, funders are often promised a first-off-the-line gadget -- one that may never arrive at their door.

One oft-overlooked, yet critical detail should help curb expectations, while also serving to filter out pledges that are motivated by the pre-order promise, from those that offer financial support without a guaranteed return. Like it or not, all transactions fall into that second category. Pre-order offers may go unfulfilled, and some pledges may be reduced to donations, if a project creator ends up unable to deliver an item as intended. And such situations may not prompt a refund, souring the experience for an increasing number of hopeful device owners. Join us past the break for an explanation from the Kickstarter team, and a closer look at some recent examples.

Continue reading Kickstarter talks to us about product 'pre-orders,' won't force refunds when creators flake

Kickstarter talks to us about product 'pre-orders,' won't force refunds when creators flake originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 07 May 2012 14:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bird Poop Chandelier Is Not for the Faint of Heart [Art]

Funny as this chandelier of pooping birds may be, surely this is not meant for show in the home of an actual human being. I mean, how long could anyone go before the joke wore off and they just got sick of looking at it? My gut instinct arbitrarily predicts three weeks. [Wyatt Little via Design Milk] More »

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BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha hands-on

Behold the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha. Research in Motion is now following in the footsteps of tech giants like Nokia, Intel and Qualcomm by pushing out a device solely dedicated to serve the needs of its developers. Considering the level of importance RIM is placing on the launch of its latest OS, the QNX-based BlackBerry 10, this is a critical move for the Canadian company as it works to recruit interested parties from other platforms while strengthening its existing relationships. Emulators and development kits are nice, of course, but they can't take the place of an actual working device -- and the Dev Alpha will be the primary vehicle to drive BB 10 developers until the final production smartphones begin shipping sometime this fall.

Our time with the Dev Alpha was brief, and we weren't able to glean much out of the experience. Why? When we were given the opportunity to play with it, the device was more of a miniature PlayBook than a BB10 phone. In fact, it even had PlayBook OS 2.0 loaded rather than the next-gen BlackBerry platform. So what did we find out about this mysterious device?

Gallery: BlackBerry 10 dev alpha unit hands-on

Continue reading BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha hands-on

BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 09:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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