| Global
warming |
| Greenland
ice sheet shrinking fast: NASA |
agencies
The
vast sheet of ice that covers Greenland is shrinking
fast, but still not as fast as previous research
indicated, NASA scientists said on Thursday.
Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons
(41 cubic miles) of ice each year between 2003
and 2005 from excess melting and icebergs, the
scientists said in a statement.
The high-elevation interior gained 54 gigatons
(14 cubic miles) annually from excess snowfall,
they said.
This is a change from the 1990s, when ice gains
approximately equaled losses, said Scott Luthcke
of NASA's Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory outside
Washington.
"
That situation has now changed significantly,
with an annual net loss of ice equal to nearly
six years of average water flow from the Colorado
River," Luthcke said.
Luthcke and his team reported their findings
in Science Express, the advance edition of
the journal Science.
The ice mass loss in this study is less than
half that reported in other recent research,
NASA said in a statement, but it still shows
that Greenland is losing 20 percent more mass
than it gets in new snowfall each year.
The Greenland ice sheet is considered an early
indicator of the consequences of global warming,
so even a slower ice melt there raises concerns.
"
This is a very large change in a very short time," said
Jay Zwally, a co-author of the study. "In
the 1990s, the ice sheet was growing inland and
shrinking significantly at the edges, which is
what climate models predicted as a result of
global warming.
"
Now the processes of mass loss are clearly beginning
to dominate the inland growth, and we are only
in the early stages of the climate warming predicted
for this century," Zwally said.
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| Investigation
in progress |
| Russia
probes reports Spanish king shot drunk bear |
agencies
A
Russian region has ordered an inquiry into a
report that hunt organizers, keen to make the
King of Spain's chances of killing a bear easier,
provided a tame one drunk on vodka, a regional
spokesman said Thursday.
"
The governor has ordered a working group set
up...to check the facts published in local press
about the killing of the bear," said a spokesman
for Vyacheslav Pozgalev, governor of the northwestern
Vologda region.
National paper Kommersant carried a letter
from Vologda's deputy chief of regional hunting
resources
management, Sergei Starostin, which accuses
hunt organizers of plying a captive bear named "Mitrofan" with
vodka-drenched honey and then forcing him from
a cage to be shot by Spain's King Juan Carlos
I.
"
His majesty Juan Carlos killed Mitrofan with
a single shot," Starostin wrote in his letter.
Russian hunt organizers are not complete
strangers to such tactics. Keen hunter
and former Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev had trouble with
his aim in his later years. Some of the animals
he liked
to stalk were either tied to trees or plied
with booze.
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