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Geology Professor Eugene Domack
Geology Professor Eugene Domack

Professor of Geology Eugene Domack was quoted in a USA Today article about why an Antarctic ice shelf broke up and what the implications are for global climate change:

The one thing that's absolutely clear about the collapse of Antarctica's Larsen B Ice Shelf last month is that sea water now washes over an area roughly the size of Rhode Island that thick ice had covered for centuries...

Around 60 scientists from about a dozen nations spent April 4 and 5 wrestling with these questions during a conference at Hamilton College, sponsored by Hamilton, Colgate University and the National Science Foundation (NSF)...

...a report by Eugene Domack of Hamilton College on his research last December that showed the Larsen B Ice Shelf had been in place since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, unlike other ice shelves in the area that had collapsed and formed again over the centuries.

The disintegration of Larsen B seems to be "something outside the normal climate variability, Domack says "The warming seems to have been extraordinary. Does that mean it's related to greenhouse gasses? Well, that's a little bit more difficult to say."

...One of the conference's big questions is why is the Peninsula the only part of Antarctica that is warming so much.

Domack pointed to a recent Science magazine research report that the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, has been warming. The Antarctic Peninsula juts out into the the wind-driven ocean current that circles Antarctica. Maybe the Peninsula is warming quickly because "it is the finger that is stuck into the warming kettle," Domack says.

...Figuring out what the atmosphere, oceans, and Antarctic ice have done in the past and might do in the future involves pulling together clues from a host of sources ranging from fossils buried in ocean-bottom mud to the outputs of more and more powerful computer models.

It's a complicated detective story, Domack agrees. "No one page is going to give you the whole plot, you have to read the book."

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