Update: January 24, 2007

NEW LAND

By Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

There’s no question that Mark Twin was, in essence, correct when he coined the real estate agent’s mantra “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.”  The amount of land on our ocean planet is certainly finite.  But there can be new land created.  Just ask the people on the Big Island of Hawaii if nature makes new land.  Volcanoes may destroy what’s on the old land but there’s no question that the island of Hawaii is growing larger.  Kilauea Volcano alone has added over two hundred hectares (544 acres) to Hawaii’s real estate market in the last 20 years.

The island of Surtsey today

But volcanoes don’t just add to existing real estate.  Sometimes totally new land appears.  Two famous instances are the island of Surtsey off the southern coast of Iceland and Anak Krakatoa in Indonesia.  Surtsey was formed in a volcanic eruption that began about 400 feet below sea level, and reached the surface on 14 November 1963.  Anak Krakatoa, or ‘child of Krakatoa’ is the island formed by the still active vents of Krakatoa, the volcano that produced the most violent explosion in modern times in 1883.

Anak Krakatoa in the foreground; the remnant of Krakatoa in the background

Another new island formed from an erupting volcano emerged from the ocean last year in the Kingdom of Tonga. 

You don’t have to go so far afield to find new land in the making.  We’re all waiting for Esmeralda to break surface.  That’s the giant volcano 30 miles due west of Tinian and Saipan.  Esmeralda is quite near the water’s surface and a major eruption would certainly increase the land area in the CNMI by creating a new island.  Then there’s Mt. Tracey, the large active volcano that’s about 15 miles off Guam’s northwest bow.  But Mt. Tracey is still about 3,000 feet below the surface so don’t expect to see another Cocos Island from Tumon in your lifetime.

The new island in Tonga

But that’s not the only way that new land can be created on our little blue ball.  And this new land’s creation has a more sinister implication for all of us, not just those that live in the shadow of volcanoes.
In 2005, an American explorer named Dennis Schmidt, who has logged over 100 Arctic expeditions, was sailing off the northeastern coast of Greenland and saw an island he couldn’t find on the map.  His map showed a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers; not an island.

Last year, Dennis Schmidt took a helicopter ride to the ‘peninsula’ which melting ice has revealed isn’t connected to the mainland at all, but is a separate island.  Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater runs between a newly exposed shoreline and the blue walls of a retreating ice shelf.  

And Dennis Schmidt isn’t the only one.  Explorers and cartographers mapping in all parts of the Arctic are discovering “new” islands appearing that were once thought to be part of the mainland.  Instead, these islands were glued together by massive layers of ice, and those frozen connections are thawing, revealing a very different geography.

The New York Times reports that the rapid acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise.  Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in their discharge speed all over Greenland.  Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial earthquakes" have been detected within the ice sheet.

Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks is beginning to worry.  The New York Times quoted him as saying "The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don't react very quickly to climate.  But that thinking is changing right now, because we're seeing things that people have thought are impossible."

Until recently, ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming.  Climate scientists were quite sure the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible for the next 100 years based on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.  It just goes to show that you can’t necessarily trust those computer models to tell you the truth.  A recent study of actual data has shown that Greenland has become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.  Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic MILES of ice per year.

If all of the glaciers on Greenland melted, the resulting influx of water into the world ocean would raise sea levels around the globe about 25 feet.  If the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica slides into the sea, worldwide sea leaves could rise as much as 30 feet.  Have you been to the port lately?  Have you ever thought about how a 10-foot rise in sea level could affect YOUR personal food supply?

New islands in Greenland, Norway and Canada may not be a good thing.  Dennis Schmitt, the man who discovered the new island in Greenland, is fluent in Inuit.  He has named his new island Uunartoq Qeqertoq or Warming Island.  Warming Island should be a warning to us all.