Three Reasons the World Will Soon End: Reason 2

Albedo. Albedo, as defined by wikipedia.org is the extent to which an object diffusely reflects light from the sun. The measurement of an object's albedo ranges from 0 to 1. Something that is very darkly colored would be closer to 0 while something very lightly colored, bright and white, would measure nearer to 1. Albedo is related to reflectivity in that it is a specific form of reflectivity which not only takes into account how much light bounces off of a surface, but also the electromagnetic radiation involved in the reflection. And why is this important? The end of the word will stem from this small property of light and physics. Picture the Arctic Ocean. It is littered with ice burgs, buoyant in the water off of the coast of Greenland, each serenely floating in the sea water. Think about the water. What color is it? (If you never got over the need to color the seas of your coloring books purple and the sky orange, the hair blue and the skin green, I'll help you). The water is dark blue. Dark, heavy, dense, albedo- of - almost - 0 blue. What color are the ice burgs? Again, for those challenged in this exercise, they are white. Pure, brilliant, shining, albedo - of - 1 bright. Keep this in your mind. Now, think back to a hot summer day you once experienced at a park. Picture an ice cube from your coca-cola on the wooden surface of a picnic table. You are hot and sweaty in your summer clothes watching the ice cube melt away, picturing yourself small enough to bathe in the icy water that is running off its sides. The ice cube is melting at a certain rate. You cannot notice specifically, but it is getting faster as the ice cube melts. The cube dwindles away until it is a small ice chip. And then it is gone. The rate of the ice cube melting is significantly faster when it is just a little chip compared to the rate when it is a large block. Remember? The ice burgs of the world's coldest oceans are melting due to global warming. A significant property of the melting stems from the differing albedo of the ice and the water it floats in. Dark water, like all other things with a low albedo, absorbs heat. The light is not reflected from its surface and heat stays in the water. Highly reflective ice does not absorb heat, instead the light bounces off of the burg and into the water surrounding it. Not only is the ocean water thus gaining light and heat from the sun, but it is also being reflected from the ice burgs. The water retains a certain level of heat from both these sources. Further heat is contributed to the water from the act of melting by the ice. Though the heat from melting is very small, on a large scale it does contribute to the addition of heat to the water. The water around the ice heats up from these three factors and begins to melt the ice burg, working its way into the bulk of ice by beginning with the crispy outer corners. The melting progresses, just like the tiny ice cube on the picnic table, and the rate of melting rises. As the ice burg gets smaller overall, the rate of melting speeds up, the heat of the growing water continues to be trapped by its low albedo, and the globe continues to get warmer. Global warming is not a linear process, it will grow unpredictably and possibly logarithmically. The cycle is known as a feed-back system because the loss of ice cover in the oceans lowers cooling as well as contributing to warming since the land and oceans that take the place of the ice absorb heat and contribute to warming. Greenland's ice is melting twice as fast today as it was ten years ago. Examining the attached photos and video give you a visual image of how the phenomenon of the albedo feed-back cycle is contributing to global warming caused by the extreme use of fossil fuels and deforestation by humans. video @ http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/mpg/134743main_albiedo.mpg If you aren't scared enough yet, stay tuned for Reason 3, Why The World Shall Soon End.