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September 28, 2004
Greenhouse Gas Rising Over Antarctica
TOKYO (AP) - A group of Japanese researchers has found that carbon dioxide levels over the Antarctica rose by over 2.6 percent from six years ago, the first such detection of an increase in a "greenhouse" gas above the southern continent, group members said Tuesday. Many scientists fear carbon dioxide, produced by burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes, may be causing global warming by trapping heat in the Earth's atmosphere.
Takashi Yamanouchi, a professor at the National Institute of Polar Research, said carbon dioxide from populated continents was apparently making its way down to the atmosphere above Antartica. "Everywhere on earth is now being polluted by carbon dioxide," Yamanouchi said. "That may be contributing to the expansion of global warming although we must check whether temperatures in the atmosphere are in fact rising,"
Antarctica, with well-preserved ice averaging 6,000 feet thick, is one of the few places where scientists can examine climate change over time because chemicals from the air have been frozen in layers of ice year after year for centuries. Air above Antarctica should be among the cleanest on earth. To date, researchers had confirmed that the density of carbon dioxide on Antactica's ground had increased but hadn't proved the same for the atmosphere, he said.
Yamanouchi's team sent a balloon with a monitoring device 9 to 19 miles into the air above Japan's research base in Antarctica in January to collect data. It showed the atmosphere had an average 367.9 parts per million of carbon dioxide, up 9.4 ppm, or 2.6 percent, from levels in a similar survey conducted in 1998, Yamanouchi said.
About 60 Japanese scientists currently stationed at Japan's Showa Base are studying ozone holes, sea life and world climate and weather patterns.
Two Studies Indicate Thinning of Polar Ice
Glaciers in Antarctica are thinning faster than they did in the 1990s, and researchers have discovered an unexpected folded section deep beneath the ice cap, findings that may indicate the ice is less stable than had been thought.
Glaciers in West Antarctica are discharging 60 percent more ice into the sea than they are accumulating from snowfall, a research team led by Robert Thomas at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center facility in Wallops Island, Va., reports in the current issue of the journal Science.
The glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea are thinning twice as fast as they did in the 1990s, the researchers said, a rate of loss that could raise sea level by 0.2 millimeters per year.
A second paper in the same issue of Science disclosed an unexpected fold in the ice deep inside the Antarctic ice cap. The discovery suggests that the whole ice sheet is more susceptible to future change than previously thought, said the research team from England's Bristol University and the British Antarctic Survey.
Scientists now agree that, basically, we're all fucked.
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