This article by Elizabeth Newbern explains that scientist who studied about snow in arctica had believed that when katabatic winds blow the snow, that they would deposit the snow somewhere else. What they have recently discovered is that ninety percent of snow in area calls scour zones and that make up about seven percent of the snow in antarctica is been vaporized. This means that about eighty millions tons of snow is disappearing from the antarctic. Das also hopes that radar equipment will help them locate recent ice cores to help them understand the wind scouring process.
The lead scientist in Indrani Das explained that scientist had overestimated the snow amount in the scour zones and did not know how quickly the snow was disappearing. The scientist are now developing climate models that will account for the sublimation that is vaporizing the snow. All of these information for scientist to have a better understanding of the region's, climate and trends. Understanding the climate patterns in antarctica will help to explain global climate patterns that may help us in predicting short and long term weather and climate changes but if the ice in antarctica keeps evaporating then the climate of world would be unbalanced.
The article explains that what is happening in snow and scour zones but it does not give specific information of how the study of snow in antarctica will affect the climatic change in the world. The article describes only briefly climatic model that they are working on and do not give any evidence to how this information will help the mankind so we don’t know what would they do to solve this problem.
Earth Science D Odd 11/4/15
ReplyDeleteCurrent Events Comments John Marshall
For my current events assignment this week, I read Naoko Mitsui’s write-up about the mystery of disappearing snow in Antarctica. I really liked how she set the scene at the beginning of the article. She explained what scientists knew in the past, as scientists believed katabatic winds blew the snow away. She then explained the scientists new discovery about the scour zones where about seven percent of all the snow in Antarctica is vaporized into the air. I also liked how she put the numbers into perspective saying that seven percent of Antarctica’s snow is eighty million tons, which is really amazing. Finally,I thought she did a good job relating her topic to the world, saying that learning about the scour zones will better help us to understand climate change.
While Naoko’s article was very good, there were a few things she could’ve done to make it better. First off, I think it would’ve been a good idea for her to include a quote about the topic, as it helps the reader to better understand the topic. Also, she made a few grammatical errors that were silly things, like not capitalizing the name of Antarctica, which could easily be fixed.
What really surprised me about this article was that before this discovery scientists knew very little about the topic. Before, it must’ve been very odd that to see mass amounts of snow disappearing, but now they are starting to find some reasoning behind it.
Earth Science D Odd 11/4/15
ReplyDeleteCurrent Events Comments John Marshall
For my current events assignment this week, I read Naoko Mitsui’s write-up about the mystery of disappearing snow in Antarctica. I really liked how she set the scene at the beginning of the article. She explained what scientists knew in the past, as scientists believed katabatic winds blew the snow away. She then explained the scientists new discovery about the scour zones where about seven percent of all the snow in Antarctica is vaporized into the air. I also liked how she put the numbers into perspective saying that seven percent of Antarctica’s snow is eighty million tons, which is really amazing. Finally,I thought she did a good job relating her topic to the world, saying that learning about the scour zones will better help us to understand climate change.
While Naoko’s article was very good, there were a few things she could’ve done to make it better. First off, I think it would’ve been a good idea for her to include a quote about the topic, as it helps the reader to better understand the topic. Also, she made a few grammatical errors that were silly things, like not capitalizing the name of Antarctica, which could easily be fixed.
What really surprised me about this article was that before this discovery scientists knew very little about the topic. Before, it must’ve been very odd that to see mass amounts of snow disappearing, but now they are starting to find some reasoning behind it.