Water found under Antarctic ice to raise sea level forecasts

Scientists have detected a network of lakes and rivers of rapidly moving water under the thick ice sheet of West Antarctica, a discovery that will force a revision of predictions of global sea levels as the sheet melts due to climate change. The faster the water moves in the sub-glacial lakes the more quickly any melting ice from the heart of the continent will get into the open sea, causing water levels to rise.

The latest scientific report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that an uncertainty about how ice sheets responded to climate change was the biggest unknown in predicting sea levels around the world. "We can't make faithful predictions of what's going to happen to Antarctica unless we get this process understood," said Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

"The old paradigm was that most of the Antarctic was frozen to its bed. In a few places there was free water at the bottom and that was lubricating fast ice flow and that was all very steady, nothing changed very much," Prof David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey said. But this view had become out of date. "Water is not moving around in a steady trickle but filling up in one place and bursting through to another and this process is more widespread than we thought," he said.

Dr Fricker said she was surprised by the results. "We thought these changes took place over years and decades, but we are seeing large changes over months."

Housing sales drop in 40 states

news.yahoo.com :

The slump in housing deepened in the final three months of last year with sales falling in 40 states and median home prices dropping in nearly half the metropolitan areas surveyed. Formerly red-hot areas were among the hardest hit as the five-year housing boom cooled considerably in 2006. While some economists said they believed the worst may be over for housing, others predicted more price declines to come until near-record levels of unsold homes are reduced.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com, predicted that home prices in many parts of the country would continue to be under pressure for the rest of this year as the market works through still large inventories of unsold homes. He said this process will be made more difficult with banks raising lending standards because of concerns about rising mortgage default rates.

"The price declines we are seeing are extraordinarily broad-based and just symbolize how significant a price correction we are in," Zandi said. "We are seeing the declines concentrated in the industrial Midwest, where the job market is a mess due to the layoffs in the auto industry, and in markets such as Florida and California" where a heavy influx of speculators had bid up prices, Zandi said.

Nokia to shed 700 jobs, half in Finnish home

news.yahoo.com :

Nokia, the world's leading maker of mobile phones, has said it would shed some 700 jobs, with Finland taking the brunt of the cuts. Nokia said it was taking "proactive steps" to improve efficiency in research and development and related sales and marketing activities and internal information technology operations.

In 2006 Nokia employed some 65,000 people globally. In January the company reported a 19% jump in net profits for 2006 to 4.3 billion euros (5.6 billion dollars), and a rise in sales of 20% on the year to 41.1 billion. Nokia's main rival, US-based Motorola, recently announced it was cutting 3,500 jobs in a bid to boost profitability.

Hershey to cut 1500 jobs

news.yahoo.com :

Hershey Co. will cut 1,500 jobs, or about 11% of its work force, and reduce the number of production lines it operates by more than a third as it spends up to $575 million to overhaul its manufacturing. The largest U.S. chocolate maker also said it would outsource production of some products and would build a cost-efficient manufacturing plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

The moves come as the company looks to free up more money to spend on marketing as it tries to regain lost market share from archrival Mars Inc. When the overhaul is complete, production from North America and Canada will represent about 80% of the company's total, down from the current 90%, Hershey said.

(2007-03-01 12:17:44 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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