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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Something that came up in discussions about deserts was the one on Greenland. This is, like Antarctica, an example of an all-wet landscape (ice) that doesn't get much of the substance that made it so (snow). Greenland is there because snow falls but doesn't melt, so just builds up. But how much is 'not much'?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier_Girl wrote: | Glacier Girl is a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, World War II fighter plane, restored to flying condition after being buried beneath the Greenland ice sheet for over 50 years.
On 15 July 1942, due to poor weather and limited visibility, six P-38 fighters and two B-17 bombers were forced to return to Greenland en route to Great Britain and made emergency landings on the ice field.
All the crew members were subsequently rescued, but Glacier Girl, along with the unit's five other fighters and the two B-17's, were eventually buried under 268 feet of snow and ice that built up over the ensuing decades. |
Actually that's not much. 268 feet of snow is the equivalent of twenty-two inches of rain. Spread over fifty years that is certainly desert-proportion precipitation. [Desert: land receiving ten inches of rain or less, annually.] But look at it another way:
* 268 feet in fifty years is hellishly fast growth, despite a bit of iceberg-spawning on the coast.
* Orthodoxy regards Greenland as a kind of permanent northern hemisphere Antarctica and pays it no mind.
* Our own theories say Greenland shouldn't exist, given the accepted theory of geomorphological prime movers
* But is merely a grounded iceberg, the product of pole shifts in the quite recent past.
Who d'ya reckon is right given the history of Glacier Girl?
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Pete Jones
Site Admin
In: Virginia
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Actually that's not much. 268 feet of snow is the equivalent of twenty-two inches of rain. |
But it says it the 268 feet is "snow and ice." Presumably, it was not pure snow puff when they got down 200 feet (or whatever). If the bottom 50 feet is ice, then the snow is crushed into much more dense layers of ice. I think this would imply much more precipitation.
I don't know if this changes anything in your assessment, just wondering aloud if it matters.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Not really. I doubt very much whether the icefield in question is within the Greenland desert (situated in the far north-east). However your point about crushed ice might be relevant when it comes to deciding the age of Greenland.
The problem here is that the weight of the ice has already pushed the original surface -- whether it was land or ocean floor -- beneath sea level. Hence orthodoxy, who are mesmerised by 'continents' because 'continental drift' was the forerunner of Plate Tectonics, treat Greenland as being the same as, say, Canada or Iceland.
For us, the whole surface of the earth is the same whether it happens to be covered by a bit of water or not. We do not include icebergs that have grown
* so large they have got stuck on the ocean floor
* so heavy they have dug their own foundations into the ocean floor
* so high they have their own climate at the top
* so cold it prevents any new snow melting
* so old they fool foolish geographers into supposing they are land.
Imagine asking a geographer how old Canada is.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The world's first firestorm occurred in Hamburg in 1943. There have been four others: Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. They were all the result of human intervention (bombing) and the phenomenon came as a complete surprise to science.
Firestorms do not rely on an external initiator and a medium, they are generated by their own heat and sustained by atmospheric oxygen. They turn expected casualties from three, occasionally four, figures into five, more usually six, figures.
Natural wildfires, so far as is known, do not turn into firestorms. This appears to be changing. First in Australia, then in Canada and now in France, various new phenomena have been reported in association with natural wildfires. These include 'mini-fire vortexes', self-sustaining 'fire loops' and columns of hot 'pyro-cumulonimbus clouds'.
Since none of these things have been reported before 2002, it can be assumed they are the product of humanly-induced climate change. It is not known whether these new factors will result in the world's first full-on 'natural' firestorm. It will be... er... spectacular if they do.
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