Australian bushfire smoke turns New Zealand glaciers brown

WELLINGTON -- Smoke from Australia's bushfires has created a haze across New Zealand thousands of kilometers away with normally white glaciers turning a shade of caramel, according to social media posts Thursday.

The acrid-smelling smoke first appeared in the country early Wednesday when in many areas the sun appeared as either a red or golden orb, depending on the thickness of the haze.

"Smoke which has traveled around 2,000km across the Tasman Sea can clearly be seen," New Zealand's official forecaster MetService tweeted. 

"Visibility in the smoke haze is as low as 10km in the worst affected areas." 

A Twitter user called Miss Roho tweeted: "We can actually smell the burning here in Christchurch." 

Another woman, Rachel, posted a photo of the Franz Josef Glacier -- more than 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) away -- with its usual pristine white taking on a brown hue.

"Near Franz Josef glacier. The 'caramelized' snow is caused by dust from the bushfires. It was white yesterday," she said in a post Wednesday.

Comedian Jemaine Clement posted a photo of a golden orb.

"All the way over in NZ the Australian bushfire smoke in the atmosphere giving us this strange sun," he said.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Himalayan glaciers melting far faster this century - study

LONDON, United Kingdom—Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since the start of this century, underscoring the threat the climate crisis poses to water supplies for hundreds of millions of people across Asia, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Scientists have long been trying to establish how quickly rising global temperatures caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas are eating away at the region's icebound landscapes, sometimes referred to as Earth's third pole.

The new analysis, spanning 40 years of satellite observations across India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, showed glaciers have been losing the equivalent of more than a vertical foot-and-a-half of ice each year since 2000. That represents double the rate between 1975 and 2000.

"This is the clearest picture yet of how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting over this time interval, and why," lead author Joshua Maurer, a PhD candidate at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a statement.

Although the study, published in Science Advances, did not attempt to ascertain precisely how much ice had melted, Maurer said the glaciers may have lost as much as a quarter of their mass over the last 40 years.

The accelerated melting appears to be swelling rivers during warm seasons, but scientists are concerned about the long-term impact on irrigation, hydropower and drinking water supplies that support some 800 million people.

Joseph Shea, a glacial geographer at the University of Northern British Columbia, who was not involved in the study, said the findings demonstrated that even glaciers in the world's highest mountains were being affected by higher temperatures.

"In the long term, this will lead to changes in the timing and magnitude of streamflow in a heavily populated region," Shea said.

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Melting Antarctic glaciers to raise seas, study warns

OSLO - Vast glaciers in West Antarctica seem to be locked in an irreversible thaw linked to global warming that may push up sea levels for centuries, scientists said on Monday.

Six glaciers, eaten away from below by a warming of sea waters around the frozen continent, were flowing fast into the Amundsen Sea, according to the report based partly on satellite radar measurements from 1992 to 2011.

Evidence shows "a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into a state of irreversible retreat", said lead author Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The coastal ends of the glaciers rest on bedrock below sea level, holding back a vast weight of ice and making them vulnerable to melt, he said. He likened the process to uncorking a full bottle of wine while it was lying on its side.

This part of Antarctica would be a major contributor to sea level rise in coming decades and centuries since the glaciers hold enough ice to raise sea levels by 1.2 metres (4 feet).

"It's passed the point of no return," he told a telephone news conference.

Ice-penetrating radars showed no mountain ranges entombed under the ice, for instance, that could halt the flow. The fastest retreat was 34-37 km (21-23 miles) over the period in the Smith/Kohler glacier.

Even so, cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, part of efforts to rein in global warming, could at least slow the slide of the Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Pope, Smith and Kohler glaciers.

"We do think this is related to climate warming," Rignot said. The scientists believed that a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was affecting wind patterns around Antarctica, driving warmer waters towards the continent.

Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a U.N. pact by the end of 2015 to combat global warming, which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says will cause more floods, droughts, heat waves and higher seas.

SEA LEVELS

Monday's findings may also mean that scenarios by the IPCC for sea level rise are too low. The IPCC said last year that sea levels are likely to rise by between 26 and 82 cm (10 and 32 inches) by the late 21st century, after a 19 cm (7 inch) rise since 1900.

"The major ice sheets of this planet will have a larger and larger role in sea level rise in the decades ahead," said Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the study.

Last week, another study also suggested a part of the far bigger ice sheet in East Antarctica may also be more vulnerable than expected to thaw. The IPCC says it is at least 95 percent probable that warming is caused by human activities, led by the burning of fossil fuels.

Monday's study, to be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, adds to signs of climate change under way.

On May 6, the Obama administration issued a study saying that warming "once considered an issue for a distant future has moved firmly into the present."

And the IPCC said in March there were signs of irreversible changes to tropical coral reefs and to the Arctic.

A separate study of the Thwaites glacier by the University of Washington in the journal Science also said it may have begun an unstoppable collapse that could last from 200 to 1,000 years.

A disappearance of the Thwaites alone would raise world sea levels by 60 cm (1.96 feet) but the "glacier also acts as a linchpin on the rest of the ice sheet, which contains enough ice to cause another three to four metres of sea level rise", it said.

The findings contrast with a paradoxical expansion of the extent of ice floating on the sea around Antarctica in recent winters that the scientists said may be part of natural variations. "The changes in the glacier reflect much longer-term processes," Tom Wagner, a scientist with NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in the telephone briefing. (Editing by Mark Heinrich)

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