Global burning is causing a rise in oceanic temperatures. This rise is more pronounced than the rise in terrestrial temperatures.

"World-wide, the oceans are warming at the rate of about 1C a decade."

"The seas around Antarctica are now 2.5C warmer than they were in the 1920s."; "the antarctic peninsula has warmed by 2.5C since 1940."; "The meteorological records show that in the last 50 years the antarctic peninsula has warmed by an unprecedented 2C."

"Much of the arctic ocean has warmed by 1C or more since 1987 .."; "The arctic has warmed by twice as much as the rest of the Planet over the past 150 years - but half the warming took place more than 60 years ago and was probably due to natural influences. This is the conclusion of the most comprehensive analysis yet of past temperatures in the far north. Since about 1840, the arctic has warmed by an average of 1.5C, compared to a global average of around 0.6C. Overpeck says that between 1840 and 1920, the warming "is likely to have resulted from natural rather than human infuences". But he believes that since then, human influence has been "probably the dominant cause". On the other hand, say co-author ray bradley .. the more researchers match fluctuations in past centuries to natural influence, the clearer it becomes there is "an excess warming this century". This warming is probably down to humans, he says. "And it leads us to expect that anthropogenic warming will swamp the other influences in the coming decades."

"In a new study of Pacific sea surface temperatures, Knutson and Manabe find a warming trend over a large part of the equatorial Pacific over the past century. This trend has accelerated in recent decades. Since the 1970s temperatures have risen at a rate of 2.9oC per 100 years - this is more than twice the rate of change found over the previous 20 years."

.. "researchers at the scripps institution of oceanography published results of a survey off southern california, where the surface water had warmed by 1.5C since 1951. The warmer water had become less well mixed over the period, and consequently the biomass of zooplankton had decreased by fully 80%. Associated with this decline had been a drop in fish and bird populations ..."

It is not only the oceans’ surface temperatures that are rising, so too are deep water temperatures, "The oceans have warmed significantly over the past four decades, providing new evidence that the Earth may be undergoing long-term climate change. The findings, reported by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also may support the findings of computer climate models that suggest more severe temperature increases than are shown by actual historic surface temperature readings. The new research "is of enormous importance to the climate change issue," said climate modeler James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "In my opinion, the rate of heat storage in the ocean is the single most important number that we need to check our understanding of decadal climate change.""

Warming oceans are causing a decline in marine Algae. This is paradoxical because Algae flourish in warmer waters. What is happening is that the warming oceans are strengthening ocean stratification preventing the cold water from the ocean bed rising to the ocean surface and bringing with it huge quantities of nutrients. Marine Algae are declining because global burning is reducing their food supply rather than because of excessive warming, "Kump and lovelock conclude that ocean warming is now proceeding rapidly, especially in the tropics and lower latitudes, with the result that plankton activity is declining. The oceans are therefore losing their ability to regulate the climate."

It is believed that rising marine temperatures are also killing coral reefs through a process known as coral bleaching, "By the 1990s there were around 10 bleaching events a year, affecting 20 countries. Usually the coral recovers in the following cool season, but if all algae are lost the coral will die. Some galapagos reefs hit by bleaching in 1983 have yet to recover."; "1998 has been the worst year for coral bleaching ever. The change in water currents produced by El Nino has flooded the eastern Pacific Ocean with warm water, harming coral throughout south- east Asia, the Indian Ocean and even the east coast of Africa."

Around the Earth, the increase in terrestrial, but especially oceanic, temperatures has led to the melting of glaciers; an increase in the number and size of icebergs; the disappearance of ice shelves; an increase in the movement of ice streams; and some threats to the stability of the Antarctic ice sheets.

Ice sheets are vast layers of ice covering land. Ice shelves are like ice sheets but they either float on the surface of the sea or overhang the sea. Ice shelves .. "are floating glaciers formed where land glaciers meet the ocean ..."

Ice streams are conveyor belts, or rivers, of ice flowing between walls of slower moving ice. They can be thousands of metres thick and hundreds of kilometres long. Some move at the rate of a metre a day but others move much more quickly.

Glaciers are streams of ice flowing between mountains.

Permafrost is permanently frozen land, "To the north of the tundra stretch the great frozen wastes of permanent snow and ice caps. This snow desert is to be found in alaska, canada, greenland and the ussr."

In polar waters there are vast deposits of ice crystals containing methane lying on the ocean bed. If the oceans warm these crystals could melt and release vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere.

"Ice covers about 10% of all land and 12% of the oceans. Most lies in polar sea ice, polar ice sheets and ice caps ..."; "Land ice covers 10.8% of the continent; sea ice covers 7.3% of the ocean. During the last ice age, which ended some 10,000 years ago, the proportion of land ice was trebled, rising to 32% of total land area - about the same area as deserts cover today. The bulk of this ice lies on antarctica."; "Permafrost, that layer of ground towards the arctic circle and on the mountain ranges that is permanently frozen, covers 25% of the global land surface."; "Permafrost covers 25% of the global land surface."

"The importance of antarctica and the sea ice that surrounds it can scarcely be exaggerated. The ice sheet is twice the size of australia; the sea ice, at its maximal seasonal extent (in august), covers an area seven times that of all the tropical rainforests in the world, and twice that of the tropical and temperate Forests combined. But at its minimal extent (in february), it shrinks to a mere one-fifth of its maximum size."; "The bulk of this ice lies on antarctica. Some of this ice reaches a depth of 15,669 feet and rests on bedrock as much as a mile below sea level .. Its area is a third bigger than europe or canada, twice as big as australia, 86% of the world’s ice cover. The greenland (arctic) ice sheet is only an eighth the area of its southern counterpart."; "Antarctica has some seven million cubic miles of ice, representing some 90 percent of the world's total. The ice averages one and a half miles in thickness (7,100 feet-2,164 meters), with the thickest ice being almost three miles thick (15,7000 feet-4,785 meters). Antarctica is as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Antarctica is the highest, driest, coldest, and windiest continent despite containing 70 percent of the world's freshwater, much of Antarctica is a desert, with the annual snow accumulation over much of East Antarctica being the equivalent of less than two inches of rainfall."

The antarctic has many ice shelves. The ross ice shelf is .. "a mass of floating ice the size of texas"; "The ross ice shelf is twice the size of the united kingdom .. " The muller ice shelf is .. "at the end of lallemand fjord on the western coast of the antarctic peninsula." The ross and ronne-filchner ice shelves stabilize the west antarctic ice sheet.

The movement of ice streams is unpredictable, "These ice-bounded ice streams are vast - 50 kilometres wide, hundreds of kilometres long and more than a kilometre deep. More importantly, they are fast. They move at more than a metre a day, which for ice is a breakneck speed. Ice streams such as this exist only on the west antarctic ice sheet, the smaller of the continent’s two enormous ice sheets. The western sheet has a handful of streams on the siple coast, which pour into the huge ross ice shelf - a mass of floating ice the size of texas - and two on the opposite side of the continent, which spill onto the equally large filchner-ronne ice shelf. (It is believed these streams exist because they are) "sliding on a lubricating bed of thick mud."

The melting of ice around the world would reduce the albedo effect and boost global burning. Ice sheets, glaciers, snow covered land, all have a high albedo effect. The albedo effect of ice is higher than that of the surrounding land or seas, "The ice caps reflect more than 95% of incident solar radiation and thus keep the planet cool; melting, they would produce blue-green water, which reflects less than 15% of the sun’s energy and has a heating effect - which would augment the rate of melting."

A "draft report for the inter governmental panel on climate change, (ipcc) due for publication in november 1990 identifies 'unprecedented and rapid' changes in global climate since the early 1980s. Glaciers around the world continue to melt at a "remarkable" rate."; "Glaciers across most of the world are retreating faster, according to new American research. The river of ice on top of Mt Kenya has lost 92 per cent of its mass in the past century, said Mark Meier of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The glaciers on Mt Kilimanjaro have shrunk by 73 per cent. In 1980 there were 27 glaciers in Spain; now there are only 13. ''The disappearance of glacier ice is more pronounced than we had thought,'' he told the American Geophysical Union meeting in Boston yesterday. ''We might find statistics similar to Spain in places like Africa, New Guinea and South America.'' That mountain glaciers in tropical and temperate zones are shrinking is not news: the trend was spotted decades ago. Glaciers now ''end'' much higher up mountains. This is part of the armoury of evidence for global warming. But the evidence is confusing. Most glaciers are in inaccessible places. Observation satellites have made it possible to estimate their mass, but geographers have no measure of their past behaviour. In the Alps ice loss has been about 50 per cent this century, in New Zealand 26 per cent, in the Russian Caucasus 50 per cent, and in the Tien Shan range between China and Russia 22 per cent. There are about 200,000 glaciers, but there is accurate data for only a few hundred."; "Rising temperatures are melting glaciers from the Peruvian Andes to the Swiss Alps."

"In 1999, another body was found in a melting glacier in the Yukon Territory of western Canada. "Our ancestors are emerging from the ice with a message for us: The Earth is getting warmer," said Brown."

"Europe’s alpine glaciers have lost half their volume since 1850 .."; "Signs of melting are everywhere. In late 1991, hikers in the southwestern Alps discovered an intact human body, a male, protruding from a glacier. Apparently trapped in a storm some 5,000 years ago and quickly covered with snow and ice, his body was remarkably well preserved."

"Glaciers in new guinea are retreating at the rate of 45 metres per year .."

.. "the area of the Alps covered by glaciers has halved over the past 150 years .." See the rest of the argument below.

"The glaciers of pindari and gomukh in the central himalaya are retreating by 31 and 18 metres respectively every year due to the gradual increase in atmospheric temperature which is the direct result of depletion of Forest cover."

.. "Peter Walker, director of disaster policy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, sees a new hazard. According to scientists at the University of Delhi, he told a Red Cross world disaster forum on Tuesday, at the present rate of melting of Himalayan and Alpine glaciers "in 80 years time, we are liable to have no glaciers. It's the continual melt of the glaciers that feeds the rivers and keeps them going all year round. It means in the long run less river flow and less for irrigation. In the short term, as the glaciers melt, that water has to come from somewhere. At the foot of the glacier you have a moraine, a big hump of debris left over. The glacier melts very fast , and you get an accumulation of water behind it, a lake literally perching behind an extremely badly constructed dam. What happens to badly constructed dams with too much water behind them? They burst. And almost all of these are on the headwaters of rivers that are heavily populated because that's where the agriculture is.""

"Why isn’t the sea rising if temperatures are rising? Because many glaciers are growing, not melting. One of the largest studied northern glaciers is the bering glacier, a vast ice sheet that extends through central alaska. During the late 1980s the bering glacier was retreating several yards annually .. By december 1993 it was advancing up to 300 feet per day, growth so rapid scientists called the movement a ‘surge’."

"Although the area of the Alps covered by glaciers has halved over the past 150 years, the Jostedalsbreen Glacier, northeast of Bergen, in Norway, has been growing for 20 years. Parts of the glacier are now expanding at a 2.8cm (7 inches) per day. The reason is simple, glaciers grow when there is snow falling on them, and there is more winter snow falling on the mountains of Norway because the North Atlantic is getting warmer. Because weather systems at the latitudes of Norway and Britain come from the west, the warm water of the North Atlantic sends warm, moist air eastward in winter. More warmth means more evaporation, and more moisture in the air. Over Norway, it collides with cold air and falls as snow.."

.. "if all these glaciers (outside the polar regions) were to disappear completely as the world warmed, the sea could rise by as much as 50cm."

There is evidence that the arctic tundra has started melting, "The Arctic tundra is melting - releasing methane, "The ipcc report says this effect has probably been underestimated."; "In many areas on the edge of the arctic (the permafrost) shows ominous signs of melting, and in doing so threatens to destroy the foundations of many oil and gas pipeline, railways, roads and buildings. The permafrost zone in china carries more than 3000km of railway and 13,000 miles of road, all built on the assumption that there will be no melting."; .. "snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined by 10% in the last 20 years .."; "Meanwhile, in February we learned that the demonstrably-warming Arctic tundra has transformed from a CO2 sink into a significant source of CO2."; "The Arctic town of Sachs Harbour is sinking because global warming is softening the permafrost that supports it."

The same is happening to the alaskan tundra, "Researchers from the University of California and the US Forest service, measuring the amount of carbon dioxide flowing into and out of Alaskan tundra over five summers, now publish the first evidence of significant net emissions. They calculate that if their results apply to the entire high latitude belt, the tundra emitted 0.19 billion tonnes of carbon in 1990, some 3% of all carbon emitted from fossil fuel burning that year. This is a significant positive feedback, and this process could well accelerate as the tundra warms further ..."; "In alaska, the permafrost is thawing. Average temperatures in alaska have risen one degree per decade over the past 30 years. The strongest warming has occurred in winter, just as computer modellers predicted. .. it cost $3 million to rebuild a kilometre of road near Fairbanks after the permafrost melted."; "The clearest evidence yet of global warming has come from one of the coldest inhabited regions of the globe - Alaska. Researchers from the University of Illinois have found that the most northerly state of the US, and the nearby region of Canada, has warmed by one degree Celsius per decade for the past 30 years, three times faster than the warming that has been taking place over the Arctic as a whole. The warming has serious implications, because much of the state is (or used to be) permanently frozen. Temperatures have risen by a full degree over the past 10 years even at a depth of a meter below the surface of the ground, and this is beginning to melt the permafrost. When buried islands of ice melt as a result, they make gaps which collapse and form holes, known as thermokarsts - and these holes are now opening up under roads and buildings, as well as causing landslides. By studying the thickness of old tree rings laid down in trees growing in the region, climatologists can reconstruct temperature variations of the past (the trees grow more vigorously when Alaska is warmer). This shows that there has been no warming comparable to what has gone on since the 1960s for at least 400 years (as far back as the tree ring records go). And the warming is more pronounced in wintertime, just as the computer models of the greenhouse effect predict. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Alaska is warming because of the buildup of greenhouse gases."

In 1997, the world wide fund for nature stated that, "Much of the arctic ocean has warmed by 1C or more since 1987, and more than 5% of its sea ice has disappeared in the past 15 years." A more recent study has discovered more widescale melting, "Scientists analyzing decades of data from Arctic Sea ice recently reported a significant reduction in the thickness of the ice during the last decade. The scientists found a decrease in sea ice all across the Arctic Ocean and that corresponds to previously reported evidence that the Arctic climate is warming, according to D. Andrew Rothrock of the University of Washington and colleagues. "Rothrock's work is the first confirmation that the ice is thinning," says geophysicist Terry Tucker of the Cold Region Research and Engineering Lab in Hanover, N.H. A report on the data, Thinning of the Arctic Sea-Ice Cover, was published in the Dec. 1st 1999 issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The Scientific Ice Expeditions (scicex) program, which consisted of six extended voyages, acquired the data using nuclear submarines. This study analyzed data from three autumn cruises: USS Pargo in 1993, USS Pogy in 1996 and USS Archerfish in 1997. The main focus of the expeditions has been the climate. Sometime around 1990, warmer waters from the Atlantic spilled over an undersea mountain ridge, pushing back the cooler Pacific water. The boundary between Atlantic and Pacific waters has remained shifted since then, and temperatures in the deep Arctic waters, a thousand feet below the surface, have risen 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit. "In oceanographic terms," Muench says, "that’s a pretty massive change. The Arctic is a unique ocean. It plays a pivotal role in global climate, and we know very little about it.""; "The average draft of the sea ice (its thickness from the ocean surface to the bottom of the ice pack) has declined by 4.3 feet, or 40 percent, since the first measurements were made in 1958, said the scientists. The thickness of the ice was about 10 feet between 1958-1976,the current thickness is about 5.5 feet. The present analysis, shows a widespread decrease in ice draft within the central Arctic Ocean, with the strongest decrease occurring in the eastern Arctic. Not only is the ice cover thinner in the 1990s than earlier, it appears to be continuing to decline in some regions through four years of SCICEX cruises at a rate of about 4 inches(0.1 m)/yr. The study is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and NASA. The loss of a large ice mass over the northern polar region would have a dramatic impact on the global climate system. Snow and ice help to cool the Earth by reflecting energy from the Sun - up to 80% - straight back out into space. The sinking, cold, dense, salty water which is created as ice forms also helps to drive ocean currents which redistribute heat around the planet. The Arctic is the northern pathway that water travels between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Its vast ice sheets bounce sunlight back into space, creating a cooling effect for the planet."

.. "less ice formation in the greenland sea means that its convection currents have virtually stopped."; "There was a loss of 15% in volume over the triangular region northwards from greenland to the pole, a total loss of 229 cubic kilometres of ice."; "In 1996, for an unprecedented third year running, a massive tongue of ice known as the odden feature failed to materialize off greenland. Some oceanographers believe that in normal years the melting of the feature causes huge amounts of fresh water to be sucked down into the deep, feeding the submarine current. That deep salt current acts as a natural pump, drawing the gulf stream along its regular course. That gulf stream brushes the british isles and moderates land and air temperatures as it passes. In an ‘Independent on Sunday’ report, geoffrey lean quoted the view of peter wadhams of the scott polar institute in cambridge that global warming is to blame for the feature’s disappearance. He says consequent weakening of the gulf stream is likely to make u.k. winters progressively colder, even as the world heats up."

There are vast deposits of ice crystals, hydrates, containing methane on the seabed, "There are large stores of methane trapped inside ice structures in sediments on ocean floors." As the oceans have warmed up, some of this methane has been released. This .. "may already be the most important source of methane in the atmosphere. Some 150 million tonnes a year is one guestimate."

"Scientists had hitherto assumed that the extent of the southern ocean’s ice had remained largely unaltered during the twentieth century. But a scientist in tasmania, bill de la mare, demonstrated conclusively that fully a quarter of the ice had disappeared. It turned out that an area of ice four times the size of alaska had been lost over a period of just 15 years, beginning in the late 1950s."

The first to speculate about the collapse of the west antarctic ice sheet as a result of global warming was john mercer. In the 1970s he argued the ronne and ross ice shelves act as buttresses holding the west antarctic ice sheet in place. He believed the disintegration of these ice shelves would pose a serious threat to the survival of the ice sheet, "One of the first prominent geologists to raise concern that global warming might trigger a catastrophic collapse of the antarctic ice cap was j.h.mercer of ohio state university. Because the thick slab of ice covering much of west antarctica rests on bedrock well below sea level, mercer explained in his 1978 article ‘West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the CO2 Greenhouse Effect: A Threat of Disaster’ this ‘marine ice sheet’ is inherently unstable."

Climatogists do not fear the melting of the west antarctic ice sheet. This would require a massive rise in global temperatures far beyond that currently taking place. But there is a considerable risk that the undersides of ice shelves might melt as a result of oceanic warming which could destabilize the west antarctic ice sheet. It has been found that extensive areas have started melting, "The ronnie ice shelf loses a lot of its mass from underneath the ice shelf. Already over an area the size of spain, a metre of ice is vanishing each year melted by the ocean." This could be dangerous given that the ronne and ross ice shelves .. "are thought to pin back all the land ice of west antarctic."

The current concern about the west antarctic ice sheet, however, isn’t the destabilization caused by the melting of the undersides of ice shelves but the destabilization caused by an increase in the flow of ice streams into the ice shelves. Ice streams on the west Antarctic ice sheet drain into the ronne and ross ice shelves, "The ronne ice shelf is one of the two massive ice sheets that the west antarctic ice streams drain into." Ice streams push huge quantities of ice into the oceans, "These vast conveyor belts of ice are responsible for 90% of the ice flow into the ocean." It has been speculated that if the oceans warm up, the undersides of the ice shelves propping up the west antarctica ice sheet could melt and ice streams would flow faster into the ice shelves until, eventually, the west antarctic ice sheet disintegrates, "The meltdown of the ronnie or ross ice shelves would remove the buttress they provide to the ice streams. The ice streams would accelerate and the ice sheet would collapse into the sea."

It has been discovered that the west antarctic ice sheet has collapsed on a number of occasions in the past. It was also discovered that, paradoxically, these collapses happened in periods of global warming and global cooling. This indicates that the behaviour of the ice sheet is influenced not merely by the climate but by its own internal dynamics. It seems as if every 7,000 years or so the accumulation of ice on the ice sheet reaches the point where its sheer weight triggers off the flow of ice streams leading to the disintegration of the ice sheet, "If glacialogists can find out what controls their movement (ice streams) they may have the key to what would drive the ice sheet to collapse. The ice streams would be the cause of the flood."

"Global warming could be on the verge of triggering the destruction of the west antarctic ice-sheet."

The disintegration of the west Antarctic ice sheet has been questioned because it is not possible to predict its behaviour under different conditions, "The more that’s known about the complexity of the west antarctic ice sheet, the less it is possible to predict when it will collapse. Yet a change in antartica would transform the rest of the planet."

Some scientists believe the ice streams stabilize the west antarctic ice sheet, "Rather than causing the ice sheet to become so small that it disappears, the ice streams could be preventing it from growing too big and collapsing under its own weight." However, research into what is happening to the Antarctic ice sheet is being planned, "That uncertainty (into whether the antarctic ice cap is growing or shrinking) could disappear in just a few years if nasa is successful in its plans to launch a satellite designed to map changes in the elevation of the polar ice caps with extraordinary accuracy .. A laser range finder on this forthcoming satellite, which is scheduled to be placed in polar orbit in 2002, should be capable of detecting subtle changes in the overall volume of snow and ice stored at the poles. (Curiously, a similar laser instrument is now on its way to mars and will be charting changes in the frozen polar ice caps on that planet well before scientists are able to perform the same feat for the Earth)."

Some commentators believe global burning will boost water vapour in the atmosphere leading to an increase in rainfall. In the polar regions, rain will fall as snow adding to the thickness of the ice sheets and moderating global burning, "The polar regions .. are so cold that a few degrees of global warmth is not enough to melt them but, more important, increasing warmth brings more water vapour and more snow. Ice can give rise to negative as well as positive feedback on global warming."; .. "some scientists believe that the increased snowfall in the area (the antarctic) would compensate for the ice lost through extra iceberg calving."

"But more recent research suggests that the dire warnings expressed up to that time may have been exaggerated. In the early 1990s, researchers using so-called global circulation models .. began investigating how a warmed climate would affect the Antarctic ice cap. These researchers found that greenhouse heating would cause warmer, wetter air to reach antarctica, where it would deposit its moisture as snow. Even the sea ice surrounding the continent might expand. (But) .. no one can say with any assurance whether the antarctic ice cap is growing or shrinking .. "

"There have been short-term increases in the amount of snow at the poles. Some coastal and interior sites in Antartica have accumulated ice over the past 80 years, giving a growth rate equivalent to a fall in sea level of 0.75 mm per year."

Writing in the early 1990s, robinson was sceptical about the threat of rising temperatures to the Earth’s ice cover, "It is satellite images that give us such information (about the scale of the polar ice sheet) on a regular and relable basis. But they are not yet capable of answering an equally vital question: are the ice sheets shrinking or expanding. Similarly, it is hard to draw conclusions about the melting of ice shelves in antartica."; "The surging of part of the antarctic ice sheet as a result of global warming has been seriously mooted, but so far there is little solid evidence that it might happen. Instead, the ice sheets at both poles ablate largely by calving icebergs into the ocean." Although he admits that some ice shelves are melting he does not believe this affects the antarctic in its entirety, "There is no evidence that melting (in the antarctic) is occurring, but the small wordie ice shelf off the west coast off the antarctic peninsula has largely disappeared in the past 30 years."

Gregg easterbrook is a green sceptic and, in a book written in the early 1990s, he dismissed the prospect of melting glaciers and ice sheets, "Recent studies are also tending to hold that the largest mass of ice on earth, the antarctic ice cap, is not melting and has not melted in a long time."; "Though the science of longer-term glacial behaviour is uncertain, there are indications trends point away from the conspicuous melting asserted by greenhouse theory."; "The notion of an impending ice-shelf collapse (of the eastern antarctic ice sheet) is not, however, supported by science."

Margaret thatcher treated environmental issuses with contempt. However, in 1988 after intense lobbying by a number of scientific advisers she turned a pale shade of green - after all, she had her so-called scientific reputation to think about. She pronounced, "Global warming could soon be accelerated dramatically due to a thinning of the sea ice." This didn’t stop her from agreeing, a few months later, to the go-ahead for a £12-£20 billion road building programme.

The ice sheets on the antarctic peninsula include the wordie ice shelf and the larsen ice shelves, "The two ice shelves on either side of the Antarctic peninsula are retreating. Over roughly a half-century through 1997, they lost 7,000 square kilometers of ice. But then within a year they lost another 3,000 square kilometers. Scientists attribute the accelerated ice melting to a regional temperature rise of some 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1940. "

In 1993 andrew robinson gave a conservative estimate of the melting of the antarctic, "There is no evidence that melting is occurring, but the small wordie ice shelf off the west coast off the antarctic peninsula has largely disappeared in the past 30 years." In september 1994, geoffrey lean reported that, "More than two-thirds of the 2,000 square-kilometre (770 square mile) Wordie Ice Sheet, has melted in the past 30 years: the British Antarctic Survey warns that other sheets face similar "catastrophic disintegration"." In a 1997 horizon documentary, kate o’sullivan suggested that, "Between 1974 and 1989 the wordie ice shelf has almost completely vanished." and that, "Two-thirds of the Wordie ice sheet - an area the size of luxembourg - have disappeared in 30 years."

"The Prince Gustav Channel Ice shelf .. which had appeared healthy in january (1995 was) breaking up."

"In 1991 an iceberg the size of Cyprus broke away."

Something similar happened in 1994, "The most dramatic collapse was the larson ice shelf in 1994 which lost 1300 square kilometres in 50 days."

And yet again in 1995, "A 1,300 square kilometre section of the nearby larsen A shelf collapsed and broke into thousands of icebergs in 1995." In 1995 geoffrey lean warned that, "The Prince Gustav Channel Ice shelf and the northern Larsen ice shelf, both of which had appeared healthy in january, were breaking up. (Icebergs have always broken away). But the disintegration of entire ice shelves is much more extraordinary." In march 1995 it was stated, "Last week an iceberg the size of Oxfordshire (78km x 37km) and 200 metres thick, broke away from the southern part of the Larsen ice shelf in the Antarctic. The disintegration speed of the Larsen shelf has been astonishing. The new iceberg is made from an ice sheet that joined two bits of land together, and which had always been thought of as permanent. The break up of the Larsen shelf seems to be due to rising temperatures - the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 2.5C since 1940."; In just 50 days last year 1,300 square kilometres of the Larsen ice shelf broke off, sending a plume of huge icebergs into the Weddell Sea .." In march 1998 it was stated, "Two years ago, the smaller Larsen A shelf broke up unprecedently during a single storm, after years of shrinkage."

"Its companion, Larsen B, is riddled with cracks .. ."

"Climatic warming has destroyed part of the gigantic Larsen B ice shelf in antarctica, it was disclosed yesterday. Final disintegration and melting of the 7,500 square mile shelf is now predicted within two years. The crack-up (was) disclosed by a satellite photograph taken on march 23rd .. The worst scenario is that warming will spread south to the vastly bigger ronne and ross ice shelves, which are thought to pin back all the land ice of west antarctic. The shelf is the fourth known to have broken up in a decade during which observers have seen melting icebergs drift far north of the falkland islands." In april 1998 it was stated that a crack in the larsen B ice shelf had opened up as an iceberg broke away from the main ice sheet .. "the gulf that opened up when a 75 mile square iceberg broke off and drifted away from the coast of antarctica. The huge crack also confirms satellite photographs revealing that the giant Larsen B ice shelf is beginning to break up. And experts warn that we ain’t seen nothing yet. The drifting berg is just an ice cube compared to a chunk nearly as big as northern ireland which they fear could break off from the antarctic in the next three years. Ted Scambos, a researcher with the u.s. national oceanic and atmospheric administration, said, "This may be the beginning of the end for the larsen ice shelf. This is the biggest ice shelf yet to be threatened. The total size of larsen B is more than all the previous ice that has been lost from Antarctic ice sheets in the past two decades. Larsen B is four times larger than another ice shelf which suddenly collapsed in a 1995 storm."; "Dramatic warming in parts of antarctica is almost certainly to blame for the disintegration of one of the continent’s largest ice shelves, say glaciologists. Satellite images revealed last week that the continent’s northernmost surviving shelf, the larsen B, had lost a chunk meauring 200 square kilometres during the southern summer. The loss of this chunk probably indicates "the beginning of the end" or the disintegrating 16,000 square kilometre shelf says ted scambos .. ."

"Nearly 300 square kilometres of a large ice shelf in antarctica have disintegrated by steadily warmer temperatures. The larsen B ice shelf on the east side of the antarctic peninsula could disintegrate further in weeks and even disappear, polar scientists believe. The shelf, marked on maps as a large bulge in the weddell sea, is now a bay, satellite photographs taken this month for the british antarctic survey show. Scientists in argentina worked out that larsen B had lost 283 square kilometres - three quarters the size of the isle of wight - between 11.10.1999 and 24.1.2000. Average temperatures on the peninsula .. have risen by 2.5C in the past few decades .. As a result, five ice shelves along the coast have disintegrated. The death of the larsen A shelf, north of the larsen B, was spectacular. In a few days in january 1995, 1,300 square kilometres broke up. "The collapse of these ice shelves is a remarkable indicator of climate change." said chris doake of the british antarctic survey."

"Two ice shelves on the Antarctic peninsula are crumbling far faster than anyone had predicted. The shelves, Larsen B on the eastern side of the peninsula and Wilkins on the southwest, have together lost nearly 3,000 sq km in the last year. The British and US scientists who made the discovery say the two shelves are in "full retreat"."

It has been pointed out above that the ronne, filchner, and ross ice shelves are believed to play a major role in stabilizing the west antarctic ice sheet. In turn, the ronne ice shelf may be vulnerable to the changes that are taking place on the nearby larsen B ice shelf, "The ronnie shelf - as big as spain - begins only 400 miles south of larsen B." It is possible the warming of the larsen B ice shelf could .. "spread south to the vastly bigger ronne and ross ice shelves, which are thought to pin back all the land ice of west antarctic". Other commentators fear, "The meltdown of the ronnie or ross ice shelves would remove the buttress they provide to the ice streams. The ice streams would accelerate and the ice sheet would collapse into the sea."

"The ronne ice shelf loses a lot of its mass from underneath the ice shelf. Already over an area the size of spain, a metre of ice is vanishing each year melted by the ocean."

"British scientists have discovered a giant new iceberg - bigger than the isle of wight - which has broken off an antarctic ice shelf. A team from the british antarctic survey identified the massive slab of ice, which measures 150km by 35km from an image taken by an american weather satellite. The iceberg, which has broken off the ronnie ice shelf in the weddell sea, is four times the size of the last large iceberg to calve in the region. Chris doake insisted the dramatic event was not the result of gobal warming, but a natural process."

Three icebergs calved from the ronne ice shelf in may 2000. The first was A-43, "Iceberg A-43 was detected using the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Optical Linescan Sensor (DMSP OLS) infrared imagery on May 5th 2000. It is known to have calved from the Ronne Ice Shelf sometime during the afternoon or evening of May 4th 2000, as satellite imagery indicates that the ice shelf was still intact on the morning of May 4th." The second was A-44 discovered on may 6th 2000 followed shortly thereafter by the splitting in half of A-43 creating icebergs A-43A and A-43B.

"Even the captain of the Titanic would have spotted this one. Passenger cruise ships are to be warned that a vast iceberg bigger than the Isle of Wight is heading for the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The mammoth iceberg - which weighs about 750 billion tons and towers 90ft above the water - has broken free from the Antarctic ice shelf and could travel as far north as Brazil. It will be one of the largest icebergs in decades to drift into the world's shipping lanes. The iceberg, known as Atlantic A22B, was formed in September 1986, when a chunk of Antarctica the size of Northern Ireland - with three research bases built on it - broke away from the Filchner Ice Shelf. Three gigantic icebergs were created, but they ground to a halt in the shallow water. In 1991 shipping companies were put on alert when one of the icebergs, A24, finally broke free and headed north, complete with albatrosses, penguins and an Argentine research base. It broke up in severe storms around the Falklands, but bemused residents in Buenos Aires reported sightings of smaller icebergs for weeks afterwards. Now A22B is on the move and it may get even farther north if the weather remains calm. "

The melting of the larsen B ice shelf may also be having an effect on the ross ice shelf. In march-april 2000 four icebergs have appeared .. "four separate icebergs are now drifting off from Antarctica. The latest images show them as B-15, B-16, B-17 and B-18."

"New Antarctic airstrip is destroyed by ice falling off nearby glacier. A tidal wave created by the ice chunk washed away a large part of the french dumont d’urville airstrip, completed only last year. The strip took ten years to build, against strong protests by conservationists, and involved blasting the tops of five small islands and linking them with the left-over gravel."

"A monster iceberg bigger than london floats in the sea as it heads towards the coast of argentina. The 40 mile long frozen island rises up 180 yards out of the ocean and has sparked new fears of global warming. Experts fear this iceberg - known as B10A - could herald the start of an invasion of similar chunks."

In early 1995 geoffrey lean pointed out that, "Three entire ice shelves have disintegrated over the past few years, the antarctic summer has grown dramatically longer, an important glacier is dissolving into the sea three times faster than had been thought, and part of the white continent is turning green as flowers and grasses spread rapidly over it."

In late 1995 further evidence of melting was discovered, "Norwegian scientists have produced the first statistically significant figures for the shrinking of the ice caps. Scientists at the nansen environmental and remote sensing centre at bergen analysed satellite data gathered from 1978 to 1994 to show that over this period antarctic ice has declined by an average 1.4% per decade. This is the first time that enough data has been collected to enable the statisticians to show that the decrease in not random variation."

In 1996 it was stated, "The map of Antarctica is changing fast. Scientists report today that more than 8,000 square kilometres of ice shelf on the antarctic Peninsula has been lost in 50 years as temperatures in the region have risen by 2.5C."

In 1997 kate o’sullivan argued, "At least six ice shelves on the antarctic peninsula have collapsed over the last century. And in the last two decades this process has accelerated."

At the beginning of 1998 it was announced that according to researchers with the british Antarctic survey, "Five ice shelves, covering 1,930 sq miles of Antarctica, have collapsed because of regional warming of 2.5C during the past 50 years."

In 1992 davidson argued, "There have been short-term increases in the amount of snow at the poles. Some coastal and interior sites in Antartica have accumulated ice over the past 80 years, giving a growth rate equivalent to a fall in sea level of 0.75 mm per year."

It has recently been suggested that the ice sheets themselves remain unpeturbed by the chaos around them. Researchers .. "collected more than 4 million radar measurements of the antarctic ice between 1992 and 1996, which shows that the ice sheet’s thickness changed by an average of less than 1cm."

"Huge amounts of ice have broken off the Antarctic peninsula, but there is no sign that the Antarctic continent is any less icy ... "

"Greenland covers 840,000 square miles, 85 percent of which is covered by ice up to 2 miles thick. Its ice sheet is particularly vulnerable to ice melt because it is closer to the equator than the West Antarctic ice sheet at the South Pole."

In 1998, a channel 4 news broadcast stated that scientists had estimated that the greenland ice sheet was melting at the rate of 7 billion tonnes of water per year.

"Recent research from the goddard space centre indicates that greenland’s ice sheet is melting faster than it is being created and is losing as much as a foot a year from its surface."

"Glaciers along the southeastern coast of Greenland are thinning by more than 3 feet a year - possibly because of global warming, according to a new study by NASA scientists. Researchers compared aerial surveys of the Greenland ice sheet taken in 1993 and 1994 with a similar survey taken last year. Their data indicated that parts of the ice sheet near the ocean thinned at a rate of more than 3 feet (1 meter) per year. "Why (glaciers) are behaving like this is a mystery," said Bill Krabill, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "But it may indicate that the coastal margins of ice sheets are capable of responding quite rapidly to external changes, such as a warming climate." Krabill said if the higher rate of ice flowing into the ocean from Greenland "accelerates or becomes more widespread, it would begin to have a detectable impact on sea level.""

"Peter Wadhams, of the Scott Polar Research Institute in the UK, said that for the fifth winter in the last seven years, a huge tongue of shelf ice had failed to form in the Greenland sea. Arctic ice is both thinning and dwindling. The loss of ice in the Arctic could have dramatic effects because its formation is an important part of the ocean "conveyor belt" which sends cold salty water plunging to the seabed and heading south, allowing warm water to flood in from the tropics. The Gulf stream flows north from the Caribbean, keeping Britain at least 5C warmer than expected at its latitude. It merges with the north Atlantic current and the encounter of this giant, warm surface river with the Arctic winter ice is a powerful part of the convection machine which keeps the ocean swirling. Ice is fresh water - so the sea that remains is increasingly cold, salty and dense. It sinks, beginning a kind of submarine river, 30 times the volume of the Amazon, flowing south again. But the Arctic ice cover is in retreat - shrinking by an area the size of the Netherlands every year. The Arctic ice has thinned by 40% over the last 20 years."

In 1996 paul brown stated, "Unlike antarctica, where the temperature is so cold there is no direct melting of the ice, greenland loses as much water from melting as from iceberg calving. This means a warming of greenland could have an immediate effect of thinning the ice, which would not be fully compensated for by the extra snowfall."

In 1992 davidson pointed out that, "The Greenland ice sheet is thickening at a rate equivalent to a fall in sea level of about 0.45 millimetres a year."

.. "Greenland's ice cap has not shrunk. "

"The world is experiencing the biggest thaw since the last ice age."

"Around the world, ice sheets and glaciers are melting at a rate unprecedented since record-keeping began. Changes in the area and volume of the two polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are intricately linked to changes in global climate and could result in sea-level changes that would severely affect the densely populated coastal regions on Earth."