When Greenland Melts

Long story short: If global warming proceeds as some believe it will, lots of people are going to need a boat.

Here's yesterday's Daily Mail article with details.

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An astonishing new map [top] has revealed the elevation of nearly every place on Earth.

The Global Digital Elevation Model was created using nearly 1.3 million images collected by a Japanese camera on board NASA's Terra spacecraft. It is made up of a giant grid of 23,000 tiles, with each height point spaced 98 feet apart.

It shows a detailed representation of the planet's land mass. In this colourised version, low elevations are purple, medium elevations are greens and yellows, and high elevations are orange, red and white.

It reveals that England and most of Ireland are low-lying

and share a similar elevation to Denmark, Poland and northern Russia in Europe, Mauritiana and Somalia in Africa, Brazil and Argentina in South America, Florida in the U.S.

and parts of Australia.

'This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world,' said NASA scientist Woody Turner.

"This unique global set of data will serve users and researchers from a wide array of disciplines that need elevation and terrain information."

Data from The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) has been combined with other ASTER images to create stunning terrain pictures of Death Valley and the Los Angeles Basin among others.

ASTER was launched in 1999 along with four other instruments on the Earth Observing System. It takes about 600 high-resolution images a day, each one covering an area of 60 x 60 km.

It also provides scientists with information on land surface temperatures.

Researchers said it could be used for engineering, energy exploration, conserving natural resources, environmental management, firefighting, geology and city planning, to name just a few.

It is a large improvement on the previous best topographic map, where 80 per cent of the planet's land mass was surveyed during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.

'The ASTER data filled in many of the voids in the shuttle mission's data, such as in very steep terrains and in some deserts,' said Michael Kobrick, from the Shuttle Radar project.

NASA has 15 satellites that monitor the globe providing high-resolution data on how the globe in changing. Recently the Orbiting Carbon Observatory was destroyed during launch, which was a huge loss to the space agency's Earth Science programme.

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[via Milena]