Melting Glacier Drains Lake In Chile

(AP)  Melting ice in southern Chile caused a glacial lake to swell and then empty suddenly, sending a "tsunami" rolling through a river, a scientist said Thursday. No one was injured in the remote region.

Glacier scientist Gino Casassa said the melting of the Colonia glacier, which he blamed on rising world temperatures, filled the Cachet Lake and increased pressure on the ice sheet.

The water bored a 5-mile tunnel through the glacier and finally emptied into the Baker River on April 6.

"The remarkable thing is that the mass of water moved against the current of the river," Casassa told The Associated Press by telephone from the Center for Scientific Studies in the southern city of Valdivia. "It was a real river tsunami."

The lake was nearly full again by late Wednesday, he said.

Casassa said temperatures were unusually high during the recent Southern Hemisphere summer.

"This is a phenomenon that occurs periodically during the summer season, caused by the melting of large masses of ice that swell some lakes," he said. "The basic cause is global warming."

The Tempano lake in Chile's Bernardo O'Higgins National Park abruptly disappeared last year, and has since recovered just some of its former volume.

[quetzal0666]

Someone should bottle it and ship it to the U.S. then sell it for 4.50 a bottle....

Global Warming Glacier Water,
cool and refreshing, good till it runs out...

[lochlan-2009]

Didn''t this same thing happen in the midwest hundred of thousands of years ago?

Must have been global warming then too.

I can''t believe the upcoming powers that be are going to try to change the entire worlds climate to what they THINK it should be.

[rudy654-2009]

Ohhh...now I get it. When it is colder then expected we say global climate change and when it is warm out it changes back to global warming. *wink
Posted by GrammaWhamma at 02:28 AM

Get an education!

[rudy654-2009]

Its funny how people dont believe this is happening and all they can do is make fun of others about terms and such. I guess its easier to either get in the gas guzzler or be a republican and be in denial your whole life.
Posted by marcosis78 at 10:11 PM

Exactly. These people are so brainwashed that they even deny that there is such a thing as global warming or climate change. Instead, they act like numbskulls that have nothing better to do than just demonstrate their lack of intelligence over and over.

[termtex01]

If you look at the same website (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/index.noshade.html) under "Latest regional sea ice coverage and anomalies", you can also see that sea ice levels in some areas of the arctic are the same now as a year ago. Some are less. Some are more.

Look at the data. Really, look at it. Than answer me this:

Why don''t we hear about why the Barents Sea, Kara Sea, Greenland Sea, Baffin/Newfoundland Bay, Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Hudson Bay ice levels are higher and cover more area now than they were exactly one year ago in April of 2007?

It''s a mystery.

[termtex01]

"People make jokes about Global Warming.
No one is saying why the "Northwest Passage" was ice-free in Augest 2007 for the first time in thousands of years.
Posted by Benst1 at 04:14 PM : Apr 11, 2008"

Actually, that''s not true. I found satellite imagery that shows the Northwest passage was open in 1981. Ir also shows that in 2007, unusually strong seasonal winds from the Bering Sea had blown the pack ice farther north than usual. The images show that, around Greenland and the arctic Ocean north of Canada, the sea ice was THICKER than in 1981. Because the winds had piled it up. The see ice of eastern Greenland was WIDER and THICKER than in 1981 also. You can easily see the influence winds had on sea ice.

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=09&fd=20&fy=1981&sm=09&sd=20&sy=2007

[marcosis78]

Its funny how people dont believe this is happening and all they can do is make fun of others about terms and such. I guess its easier to either get in the gas guzzler or be a republican and be in denial your whole life.

[newsterl]

ow its called global warming again?? I thought that term was changed to "global climate change".

Ohhh...now I get it. When it is colder then expected we say global climate change and when it is warm out it changes back to global warming. *wink

Posted by GrammaWhamma

No its global climate CHANGE, that means former deserts can change and former crop growing land can too, it means places that had ice capped mountains year-round that lost that are warming up while some other location such as greenland is cooling down. The PROBLEM is you dont want glacier type ice forming in Chicago and staying there year-round, nor would you want prime agriculture land to become a windblown desert crops cant grow on any more because of severe drought from the winds shifting the rain clouds further south. You also dont want to see 6 feet of rain a year that formerly got 6 inches- it tends to vastly disrupt cities, lives, money and more when people''s homes flood out and crops are destroyed.

[skyguide-2009]

Seafang - Could you perhaps "improve" your "facts", please? In your comment you state that, "Just yesterday I spoke with a Danish Nobel Peace Prize (1988) winning glaciologist who lives in Greenland..."

1) The 1988 Nobel Peace Prize went to the United Nations Peace Keeping Forces.

2) As far as I can determine, no Danish glaciologist has ever won a Nobel prize, in any category.

3) The only Nobel-prize winning glaciologists I can find were part of the 2007 Peace Prize team from the IPCC. [The views of the IPCC, of course, are at odds with your beliefs, as I understand them, so I do not think that the person you were talking to yesterday is a member of that team.]

I''d really like to learn more about the validity of global warming. If you can correct your statement so that I can determine the name of the esteemed scientist that you spoke to yesterday, them I''d be grateful.

~Michael

[termtex01]

I wonder how long it takes water to erode 5 miles of compacted earth?

A bit more than 10 years of ''global warming'' I would hazard to guess.

Compared to rates established for water seeping through man-made ***** and dams, causing failure(using the St. Francis Dam [California] failure as a basis, which failed 2 years after completion), 5 miles (26,400 feet) of erosion should take between 50 and 400 years.