After two days of about as nice Spring weather as you can imagine, this morning has dawned wet and chilly, putting a damper on any early morning hiking and picture taking expeditions. In the meantime, here are a few stories in the news today worth thinking about.

It’s looking more and more evident that while building a solar power infrastructure will help with some environmental problems, it also brings along its own, especially when you’re building in a desert.

Planting trees is always a good idea, but when it come to fighting CO2 build-up in the atmosphere, these artificial “trees” might be even better.

Even buried deep under the Antarctic ice, without light or oxygen, there is still life.

In Maine, they’re thinking about expanding wind power.

And here in Minnesota, while walleye fishermen are waiting for the big fishing opener in May, the trout fishermen are already in the streams.

Canaries in coal mines, flaming letters in the sky, disappearing Antarctic ice shelves.

One Antarctic ice shelf has quickly vanished, another is disappearing and glaciers are melting faster than anyone thought due to climate change, U.S. and British government researchers reported on Friday.

They said the Wordie Ice Shelf, which had been disintegrating since the 1960s, is gone and the northern part of the Larsen Ice Shelf no longer exists. More than 3,200 square miles (8,300 square km) have broken off from the Larsen shelf since 1986.

For years, climate change and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica as proof of their doubt. Antarctica is actually cooling!, they’d say, and use that statement as a hammer against their foes.

Well, no more, the idea that Antarctica is actually getting colder has been removed from the arsenal.

In a report published today in the journal Nature, climatologists Eric J. Steig of the University of Washington and Drew Shindell of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies say that for the first time they combined satellite observations over the entire continent with evidence from more than 100 manned and unmanned weather stations both inland and along the continent’s coasts to determine climate trends for the past 50 years.

During an hour-long teleconference Wednesday, the scientists said their data clearly shows that on average the entire Antarctic continent has been gradually warming at least since 1957.

West Antarctica, separated from the far larger eastern part by the towering Transantarctic mountain range, has long evidenced a strong warming trend. And the Antarctic Peninsula, warmer than everywhere else in the western region, is where massive ice shelves have collapsed into the sea as springtime temperatures rise above the melting point there.

But East Antarctica has been a very different story. Here, many scientists have contended that the huge region has been cooling over the past half-century.

A leading scientist who has long collected data supporting that cooling argument conceded, in an e-mail to The Chronicle on Wednesday, that the evidence in the new report “lends confidence” that the new findings on Antarctic temperature trends “are robust.”

Of course, global warming deniers rarely, if ever, let facts get in the way of their beliefs, and no doubt they’ll find a way to ignore or deny this latest evidence. But for the rest of us who live in a reality where facts actually matter and affect people’s lives, this latest news provides even more confirmation for what we already knew. The world around us is changing, and not in a good way. The evidence is there for all to see, and it’s mostly our own fault. If we don’t do something about it, and soon, millions, if not billions of people will suffer. if that happens, it’s unlikely that those living through it will be very interested in hearing “I just didn’t believe it could happen” from those who stood by and let it happen.

Eric Larsen is an explorer who isn’t afraid to think big.

In 2009, renowned Arctic Explorer Eric Larsen will begin an unprecedented journey to the top, bottom and roof of the world. During a continuous 365-day period, Larsen will mount major unsupported expeditions to the North and South Poles and an expedition to the summit of Mt. Everest. This feat has never been completed in one year. To date, only 15 people (no Americans) in history have been to all three ‘poles’. The expedition’s objectives are:

Complete the first-ever expedition to Mt. Everest, the North Pole and South Pole in a continuous 365-day period

Promote clean energy solutions, advocate strategies for reducing carbon emissions post Kyoto 2012 and collect relevant scientific data

Produce a documentary film, book and educational CD-ROM that focuses on global warming, teamwork and the spirit of adventure

Develop a post expedition multi-media lecture series

To call this an ambitious undertaking is to be guilty of gross understatement. Eric is currently on his way to the South Pole, and one of the great things about the internet is that people can follow along. You can learn more about the expeditions, and follow along on the journeys at both Eric’s personal website, and at Save The Poles.

You expect snow and ice to melt in the spring and summer, and freeze in the winter, but in Antarctica that expectation are being thwarted. Don’t look now, but it’s winter at the south pole and the ice is still melting.

New satellite images show that an Antarctic ice shelf continues to disintegrate — and even more surprising is that it’s happening during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

Experts warned last March, at the end of the Antarctic summer, that the Wilkins Ice Shelf was disintegrating more quickly, but they expected that the winter cold would put the trend in a temporary deep freeze.

At 6,000 square miles in size, Wilkins “is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last 50 years,” David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement released by the European Space Agency as it revealed the satellite images late Thursday.

It’s worth clicking through to the whole article to see the photo gallery of satellite pictures of what’s going on. If we’re going to mess with the whole world’s climate, at least we have the technology to see it happen.

The world’s climate does go through a periodic cycle of greater and lesser carbon dioxide levels, corresponding with periods of warming and cooling, and we’ve thrown that regular cycle out of whack.

That’s the lesson that’s emerging from study of air trapped in bubbles inside of antarctic ice, going back over 600,000 years. There is a kind of natural feedback mechanism that regulates amounts of carbon dioxide in the air, but the amount we’re pouring in dwarfs the natural process.

The average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume, (Richard) Zeebe said, which means that 22 molecules of carbon dioxide were added to, or removed from, every million molecules of air.

Since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century, ushering in the widespread human use of fossil fuels, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 100 parts per million.

That means human activities are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes do, Zeebe said.

The planet’s natural processes could take care of the problem, but it will take hundreds of thousands of years. We can’t wait that long. We’re going to have to clean it up ourselves.

It sounds like a silly question. Of course there’s plenty of salt in the ocean. But a recently concluded study of the deep waters around Antarctica suggest that there, at least, ocean water is becoming more fresh and less salty.

Scientists returned to the southern Australian city of Hobart on Thursday after a one-month voyage studying the Southern Ocean to see how it is changing and what those changes might mean for global climate patterns.

Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica to the bottom of the ocean about 5 km (3 miles) down was becoming fresher and more buoyant.

In both the Southern and Northern hemispheres, cold water coming off the polar regions fuels the currents that flow from the tropical regions and bring warm water to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and in the north, keeps much of Europe warmer than it otherwise would be. If the cold water becomes too fresh and less dense, it could fail to sink underneath the warmer currents and shut off the flow of warm water to where it currently goes. The result would be a dramatic, worldwide shift in climate.

It’s still a fairly remote possibility, and as the scientists stress, too early to know what’s causing the change in the water around Antarctica, but the potential affects are so dramatic that it bears keeping an eye on. We could all find ourselves living out a science fiction scenario yet, and as anyone who’s been there will tell you, major disasters are a lot more thrilling to read about in a disaster novel than they are to actually live through.

One of the scarier aspects of global warming is that some of the possible dramatic events associated with it keep happening faster than anyone had predicted. Last year, it was the rapid melting of the arctic ice cap. Now, the big news is coming out of Antarctica.

Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles (about 10 times the area of Manhattan) that appeared to have broken away from the shelf.

Scambos alerted colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) that it looked like the entire ice shelf — about 6,180 square miles (about the size of Northern Ireland)— was at risk of collapsing.

David Vaughan of the BAS had predicted in 1993 that the northern part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf was likely to be lost within 30 years if warming on the Peninsula continued at the same rate.

“Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread — we’ll know in the next few days and weeks what its fate will be.”

Here’s a picture where you can see the large crack in the ice shelf that’s causing all the commotion. The fact that this is happening in about half the time that was first predicted is astonishing, and a clear indication that we need to learn everything we can about the processes that are causing this, or else we’re always going to be playing catch-up, forced to react to catastrophic events instead of having any way to prepare for them in advance. if that’s the way it continues to work, people and the planet will suffer and there won’t be anything we can do about it.

As the man said, we should know soon if the Wilkins Ice Shelf is going to completely collapse.

There was a lot of talk this year about the dramatic increase in the rate of melting ice in the arctic. It’s winter in the arctic now, but on the other end of the world there’s growing evidence that the antarctic ice cap is also starting to see an increase in the amount of melting ice:

Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates.

While the overall loss is a tiny fraction of the miles-deep ice that covers much of Antarctica, scientists said the new finding is important because the continent holds about 90 percent of Earth’s ice, and until now, large-scale ice loss there had been limited to the peninsula that juts out toward the tip of South America. In addition, researchers found that the rate of ice loss in the affected areas has accelerated over the past 10 years — as it has on most glaciers and ice sheets around the world.

In the past, ice melt in Antarctica has been mostly seen in the peninsula that juts off the continent towards South America. Now there has been a substantial increase in the amount of melting ice in western Antarctica, nearing the same levels as seen in Greenland. The difference in Antarctica is that much of the land is near sea level, and melting glaciers could much more easily slide off the continent and into the ocean than in the mountainous areas of Greenland.

Antarctica holds about ninety percent of the Earth’s ice, and while the current changes are affecting only a small percentage of the ice cap, the potential for dramatic change is clear. If a good chunk of the Antarctic ice cap slid off into the ocean, the affects would be world-wide and dramatic, a possible rise of sea levels by several meters. It;s looking more and more like the next fifty years or so will not be a good time to be living by the shoreline.

One of the problems with human behavior is that we tend to deal with major catastrophes after they happen, instead of planning ahead to deal with them before they happen. It’s hard to believe that the world we grew up in and live in could suddenly change in a way that changes millions of lives. But that’s exactly the possibility that looms before us now, and if we don’t start planning for it and doing whatever we can to prevent it, it’s going to happen.

The study that has sparked the news reports about Antarctic ice melt was conducted by Eric Rignol and associates and is due to be published in Nature Geoscience. An advance abstract of the report is available online.

This one falls under the heading of “wow”. There’s a whole continent that turns out to be much different than we previously thought:

Antarctica is not a barren polar desert but a rich, complex environment that may contain a thriving “oasis of life,” experts say.

Researchers have uncovered a complex subglacial system miles under the ice where rivers larger than the Amazon link a series of “lake districts,” which may teem with mineral-hungry microbes.

This watery environment may be more than one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, scientists say, which would make it the world’s largest wetland.

“This is essentially a whole new world that ten years ago we didn’t know existed,” said Michael Studinger, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

“If you peel back the ice sheet, you would expect a watery landscape similar to what we would see on the surface of Earth.”

It’s always been thought that the Antarctic ice sheet basically extended all the way down to bedrock. Now it seems that much of it covers an immense area of streams and lakes that, due to being covered with ice for so long, has never been exposed to the air and my harbor all kinds of strange life. It’s incredible to discover that on a planet which has been thoroughly explored on foot and mapped from space that there can be an entire continent whose true nature has been hidden until now. It’s exactly things like this that make it worthwhile to keep searching for new discoveries, and to keep learning about places that we may think we’ve already figured out.

Mahlon C. Kennicutt II, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University, leads several Antarctic research groups.

Scientists who thought such underground lakes were mere anomalies in the late 1990s now realize the bodies of water are fundamental to several Earth processes, Kennicutt said.

“Our whole agenda has broadened,” he said.

Outbursts from subglacial lakes, for example, may have a lot to do with how the continents are shaped and reshaped.

The lakes may also hold an untapped wealth of climate records that could improve our understanding of how life evolved, he added.

I’d been thinking lately about trying to write a post that summed up the previous year and tried to looking forward to the next, but kept getting bogged down in either despair about the current state of the environment, or stuck in prose that felt either overly pretentious or not up to the task. Then something like this comes along and there it is laid out for anyone to see. A new year always brings with it the prospect of new discoveries, some of which may be scary, while others, like this new study of Antarctica, can be simply wondrous to behold. That’s why it’s always worth keeping an eye to the future, because life can always come up with surprises, and even on a planet with millions and millions of years of history, we can always find something new that makes us go “Wow, who would have believed we’d find that!.”