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The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

by LPRKirbygpyva Posted on March 22, 2016

The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

By on 22 Mar 2016 10:11 amcommentsShare

The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier. Hansen said, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Fast forward 28 years and, while we’re hardly out of the Waffle House yet, we know much more about climate change science. Hansen is still worried that the rest of us aren’t worried enough.

Last summer, prior to countries’ United Nations negotiations in Paris, Hansen and 16 collaborators authored a draft paper that suggested we could see at least 10 feet of sea-level rise in as few as 50 years. If that sounds alarming to you, it is — 10 feet of sea-level rise is more than enough to effectively kick us out of even the most well-endowed coastal cities. Stitching together archaeological evidence of past climate change, current observations, and future-telling climate models, the authors suggested that even a small amount of global warming can rack up enormous consequences — and quickly.

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However the paper, publicized before it had been through peer review, elicited a mix of shock and skepticism, with some journalists calling the news a “bombshell” but a number of scientists urging deeper consideration.

Now, the final version of the paper has been published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. It’s been reviewed and lightly edited, but its conclusions are still shocking — and still contentious.

So what’s the deal? The authors highlight several of threats they believe we’ll face this century, including many feet of sea-level rise, a halting of major ocean circulatory currents, and an outbreak of super storms. These are the big threats we’ve been afraid of — and Hansen et al. say they could be here before we know it — well before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sanctioned climate models predict.

Here we help you understand their new paper:

NASA

Sea-level rise

The scientists estimate that existing climate models aren’t accounting well enough for current ice loss off of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Right now, Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets both contribute under or near 1 millimeter to sea-level rise every year; they each contain enough stored ice to drive up ocean levels by 20 and 200 feet, respectively.

This study suggests that, since the rate of ice loss is increasing, we should think of it not as a straight line but as an exponential curve, doubling every few years. But how much time it takes to double makes a big difference. Right now, measurements of ice loss aren’t clear enough to even make a strong estimate about how long that period might be. Is it 10 years or is it 40? It’s hard to say based on the limited data we have now, which would make a big difference either way.

But then again, we don’t even know that ice loss is exponential. Ian Joughin — a University of Washington researcher unaffiliated with the paper and who has studied the tipping points of Antarctic glaciers — put it this way: Think about the stock market in the ’80s. If you observed a couple years of accelerating growth, and decided that rate would double every 4 years — you’d have something like 56,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial by now.

Or if stocks aren’t your thing, think about that other exponentially expanding force of nature: bacteria. Certain colonies of bacteria can double their population in a matter of hours. Can they do this forever? No, or else we’d be nothing but bacteria right now (and while we’re certainly a high percentage of bacteria, there’s still room for a couple other things).

Nature tends to put limits on exponential growth, Joughin points out — and the same probably goes for ice loss: “There’s only so fast you can move ice out of an ice sheet,” Joughin explained. While some ice masses may be collapsing at an accelerating rate, others won’t be as volatile.

This means, while some parts of ice sheet collapse may very well proceed exponentially, we can’t expect such simple mathematics to model anything in the real world except the terror spike of the Kingda Ka.

Shutterstock

Ocean turnover

Mmm mm, ocean turnover: Is it another word for a sushi roll or a fundamental process that keeps the climate relatively stable and moderate?

That’s right — we’re talking the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and other currents like it.

As cold meltwater flows off of glaciers and ice sheets at enormous rates, it pools at the ocean’s surface, trapping the denser but warmer saltwater beneath it. This can seriously mess with the moving parts of the ocean, the so-called “conveyor belts” that cycle deep nutrient-rich water to the surface. These slow currents are driven by large-scale climate processes, like wind, and drive others, like the carbon cycle. But they also rely on gradients in temperature and density to run; if too much cold water from the glaciers pools at the surface, the whole conveyor belt could stutter to a stop.

In the North Atlantic, this would mean waters get colder, while the tropics, denied their influx of colder water, would heat up precipitously. Hansen says we’re already seeing the beginnings of AMOC’s slowdown: There’s a spot of unusually cool water hanging out off of Greenland, while the U.S. East Coast continues to see warmer and warmer temperatures. Hansen said it plainly in a call with reporters: “I think this is the beginning of substantial slowdown of the AMOC.”

NASA

Superstorms

Pointing to giant hunks of rock that litter the shore of the Bahamas, among other evidence of ancient climates, the study’s authors suggest that past versions of Earth may have featured superstorms capable of casually tossing boulders like bored Olympians.

And as the temperature gradient between the tropic and the polar oceans gets steeper, thanks to that slowing of ocean-mixing currents, we could see stronger storms, too.

This is surprisingly intuitive: Picture a temperature gradient like a hill, with the high temperatures up at the top and the low temperatures down at the bottom. As the highs get higher and the lows get lower, that hill gets a lot steeper — and the storms are the bowling balls you chuck down the hill. A bowling ball will pick up a lot more speed on a steep hill, and hurt a lot more when it finally runs into something. Likewise, by the time these supercharged storms are slamming into coasts in the middle latitudes, they will be carrying a whole lot of deadly force with them.

So what does it all mean?

Whether other scientists quibble over these results or not — and they probably will — the overall message is hardly new. It’s bad, you guys. It might be really, truly, deeply bad, or it might be slightly less bad. Either way, says Hansen, what we know for sure is that it’s time to do something about it. “Among the top experts, there’s a pretty strong agreement that we’ve reached a point where this is truly urgent,” he said.

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So Hansen is frustrated once more with the failure of humanity to respond adequately. The result he’d hoped for when he released an early version of the paper online last summer was to get world leaders to come together in Paris to agree on a global price on carbon. As he told Grist’s Ben Adler at the time, “It’s going to happen.” (It didn’t happen, but some other stuff did.)

Still, true urgency would require more of us than just slowing the growth of emissions — it requires stopping them altogether. In a paper published in 2013, Hansen found that we have to cut 6 percent of our use of carbon-based fuels every year, if we want to avoid dangerous climate change.

Carbon prices and emissions cuts are more the purview of politicians and diplomats, but if anything, Hansen has shown he is unafraid to stray beyond the established protocol of academic science.

“I think scientists, who are trained to be objective, have something to offer by analyzing the problem all the way to the changes that are needed in order to address it,” he said on a press call. “That 6 percent reduction — that’s not advocacy, that’s science. And then I would advocate that we do that!”

And to pre-empt the haters, Hansen wants you to remember one thing. “Skepticism is the life blood of science. You can be sure that some scientists will find some aspects in our long paper that they will think of differently,” he said. “And that’s normal.”

So while scientists continue their debate over whether the ice sheets are poised to collapse in the next 50 years or the next 500, the prognosis is the same: The future is wetter, stranger, stormier unless we make serious moves to alternative energy sources now. Will we? Maybe. We’ve started but we still have a long, long way to go. If it’s a race between us and the ice sheets, neither I nor James Hansen nor anyone else can tell you for sure who will win.

Hey, no one said telling the future was easy.

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The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

Posted in alo, alternative energy, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Radius, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

Watch this insanely cool simulation of deep Antarctic water

by maciao85 Posted on November 24, 2015

Watch this insanely cool simulation of deep Antarctic water

By on 24 Nov 2015commentsShare

We begin with Raijin, the Shinto god of thunder, lightning, and storms.

No, seriously — that’s what Australian researchers named the supercomputer that they used to make this incredibly detailed simulation of what’s going on at the bottom of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. That cold, dark abyss — no, not that one — may seem remote and hard to understand, but it’s actually a key player in Earth’s response to climate change.

It should come as no surprise that the surface water around Antarctica is very cold. What might be more surprising is that it’s also very salty. That’s because, when sea ice forms, it rejects salt back into the surrounding water. The resulting cold, salty water is very dense and thus cascades down to the bottom of the ocean, where it spreads out. Here’s more from a press release about why this matters:

The movement of this dense water is vital. It is the most oxygenated water in the deep ocean and its extreme density and coldness drive many of the significant currents in the major ocean basins connected to the Southern Ocean.

The distinctly different densities of water that move around Antarctica also make it important in regards to climate change. Because the most dense water forms near the surface, close to Antarctica before descending to the ocean floor, any warming that occurs near the surface can be drawn down into the deep ocean.

Importantly, this drives more heat and more carbon into the deep ocean that would otherwise have returned to the atmosphere.

It took Raijin seven hours to process every one second of this nearly four-minute animation. According to Andy Hogg, a professor of earth sciences at Australia National University and lead researcher behind the simulation, it was well worth the computing power: “Being able to actually see how the bottom water moves in three dimensions rather than just looking at numerical, two-dimensional outputs has already opened new areas for scientific research,” he said in the press release.

Personally, my favorite part of the simulation comes at the 3:05 mark, where it looks like South Africa is blowing smoke rings. But really, the whole thing is pretty cool and will surely help scientists understand this largely mysterious part of the world. It seems only fitting that such a simulation would come from Raijin, a deity who in Japanese mythology is both feared and respected for his control over nature.

Japanese mythology also says that children should cover their belly buttons during thunderstorms, lest Raijin eat their tummies. Do with that what you will.

Source:

Big data reveals glorious animation of Antarctic bottom water

, ARC Center of Excellence for Climate System Science.

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Watch this insanely cool simulation of deep Antarctic water

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You don’t even wanna know what happens if we burn all the fossil fuels

by MonikaNQAmqd Posted on September 11, 2015

There goes Antarctica!

You don’t even wanna know what happens if we burn all the fossil fuels

By on 11 Sep 2015commentsShare

Breaking: Mother Nature has just possessed a bunch of scientists and delivered this urgent message: “If you keep burning all the fossil fuels, I will eliminate the Antarctic ice sheet, drowning most of what you’ve built and causing mass chaos in the process. Oh, and save the damn red pandas, you monsters.”

Mother Nature then dropped the proverbial mic and left the scientists to write this paper, published today in the journal Science Advances. Researchers warn that burning through the currently available fossil fuels will produce enough heat to melt not only the entire Antarctic ice sheet, but all of Earth’s land ice. To get a sense for what that means, here’s The New York Times:

A sea level rise of 200 feet would put almost all of Florida, much of Louisiana and Texas, the entire East Coast of the United States, large parts of Britain, much of the European Plain, and huge parts of coastal Asia under water. The cities lost would include Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Washington, New York, Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney, Rome and Tokyo.

It would take about a century for serious melting to get underway, but once it does, The New York Times reports, half of the Antarctic ice sheet could disappear in just a thousand years. That might seem like a long time, but it was a surprise to the scientists. Ken Caldeira, a researcher at Stanford and one of the study’s coauthors told the Times: “I didn’t expect it would go so fast … To melt all of Antarctica, I thought it would take something like 10,000 years.”

Besides melting all the world’s land ice, the roughly 20 degree F rise in the average global temperature would wreak havoc on health, food security, and basic living conditions. That, in turn, would drive large swaths of remaining life on Earth to extinction.

Of course, an easy way to avoid such devastation would be to not burn all of the oil, coal, and natural gas at our fingertips. Unfortunately, idiot politicians and greedy energy companies are making that extremely hard to do. In the mean time, coastal cities can (and are) preparing for the early stages of sea level rise. But if this worst-case scenario plays out, then, well … I know nobody likes to talk about this, but if the most important hubs of civilization go under, then all those grizzled off-grid survivalists lurking in the woods will inherit the Earth. And on that point, I’m getting one more message from Mother Nature:

“Please, don’t let the survivalists inherit the Earth.”

Source:

Climate Study Predicts Huge Sea Level Rise if All Fossil Fuels Are Burned

, The New York Times.

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You don’t even wanna know what happens if we burn all the fossil fuels

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How the universe began and how humanity will drown: A scientist’s to-do list

by AntonioBianco2 Posted on August 11, 2015

How the universe began and how humanity will drown: A scientist’s to-do list

By on 11 Aug 2015commentsShare

No pressure, scientists, but you just got your marching orders for the next 10 years, and, well, you’ve got your work cut out for you:

  1. Understand the origins of the universe (cosmic inflation, the quantum nature of gravity, the nature of everything, etc.)
  2. Figure out how life evolved in the Antarctic over the last 30 million years (seriously, who wants to live there?)
  3. Get a handle on what’s happening with those melting ice sheets that we keep hearing so much about (i.e. just tell us how this is all gonna end, so we can start writing apology letters to the future)

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released this little ditty of a to-do list for scientists working on NSF-funded Antarctic and Southern Ocean research. Two of the three initiatives are directly related to climate change and how we and other living things are going to have to adapt to it. It’s certainly reassuring that the powers that be consider these issues as important as answering the age-old questions of where everything came from and what it all means, but at the same time, it pretty much just confirms that we’re totally screwed, right?

Here’s an overview of the priorities from a press release about the report:

The report proposes a major new effort called the Changing Antarctic Ice Sheets Initiative to investigate how much and how fast melting ice sheets will contribute to sea-level rise.  The initiative’s components include a multidisciplinary campaign to study the complex interactions among ice, ocean, atmosphere, and climate in key zones of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and a new generation of ice core and marine sediment core studies to better understand past episodes of rapid ice sheet collapse. …

A second strategic research priority is to understand from a genetic standpoint how life adapts to the extreme Antarctic environment.  For more than 30 million years, isolated Antarctic ecosystems have evolved to adapt to freezing conditions and dramatic environmental changes, and now must adapt to contemporary pressures such as climate change, ocean acidification, invasive species, and commercial fishing.  Sequencing the genomes and transcriptomes of critical populations, ranging from microbes to marine mammals, would reveal the magnitude of their genetic diversity and capacity to adapt to change.

In addition to being a vast natural laboratory, Antarctica has a dry, stable atmosphere that offers an ideal setting for astrophysical observations.  The report recommends a next-generation experimental program to observe cosmic microwave background radiation, the “fossil light” from the early universe.  This would include an installation of a new set of telescopes at the South Pole, as part of a larger global array, which will allow highly sensitive measurements that could detect signatures of gravitational waves.  Such observations might provide evidence that could confirm the theory of cosmic inflation and the quantum nature of gravity, as well as address other enduring questions about the nature of the universe.

Got that, scientists? We’re looking for how the universe started, how life evolved in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, and how the oceans are ultimately going to engulf us all in a merciless end. Talk to you in 10 years.

Source:
Melting Ice Sheets, Genomic Studies, and Deep-Space Observations Are Top Priorities for Next Decade of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Research

, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

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How the universe began and how humanity will drown: A scientist’s to-do list

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Antarctica is basically liquefying

by AntonieGlossop Posted on March 27, 2015

Antarctica is basically liquefying

By on 27 Mar 2015commentsShare

Antarctica’s icy edges are melting 70 percent faster in some places than they were a decade ago, according to a new study in the journal Science.

These massive ice shelves serve as a buffer between the continent’s ice-sheet system and the ocean. As they disintegrate, more and more ice will slip into the sea, raising sea levels by potentially huge amounts.

This study is just the latest bit of horrible news from the bottom of the world. Last year, we found out that the West Antarctic ice sheet was in terminal collapse, which could raise sea levels by 10 to 15 feet over a few hundred years. Then, earlier this month, we learned that an enormous glacier on the other side of the continent is in the same state, and could contribute about the same amount to sea-level rise.

This latest research, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, reinforces those findings, adding to the evidence that the continent’s future looks quite grim. Using satellite data, researchers found that “ice-shelf volume change accelerated from negligible loss” between 1994 and 2003 to “rapid loss” between 2003 and 2012. Within a century, a number of ice sheets, which are vanishing by dozens of feet per year, could completely disappear.

Though the geology of east and west Antarctica is different — the ice in the east stretches out over water like a shelf, while the ice in the west is stuck to land below the sea — the entire continent is eroding due to warmer ocean waters and drier weather. The changing water temperature and decreased precipitation speak to broader, long-term changes in climate across the continent, though the west Antarctic is more immediately threatened.

Were Antarctica to melt completely, it would raise sea levels by more than 200 feet. That, of course, would take hundreds of thousands of years. And researchers reiterate that they need more and better data before they understand exactly what’s going on with the continent, and how quickly we can expect it to shrink global coastlines.

But the bad news doesn’t seem likely to stop anytime soon: On Monday and Tuesday, it was a balmy 63 degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom of the world, a record high.

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Antarctica is basically liquefying

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A second giant blob of Antarctic ice is getting ready to drown us

by MYZJeffrysi Posted on March 17, 2015

A second giant blob of Antarctic ice is getting ready to drown us

By on 17 Mar 2015commentsShare

Remember when we found out last year that the West Antarctic ice sheet had started to collapse, that the collapse more or less can’t be stopped, and that it will eventually result in 10 to 15 feet of sea-level rise? Now we have some more bad news of that caliber.

An enormous glacier, one on the other side of the continent from the ailing ice sheet, is doing pretty much the same thing, researchers have discovered. Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post:

The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France, and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it. …

The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It it is losing an amount of ice “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year,” notes the Australian Antarctic Division.

That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s “a conservative lower limit,” says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

If you haven’t already done the math, this means we could see well upwards of 20 feet of sea-level rise over the next few centuries, double the rise expected from the West Antarctic ice sheet alone — and those are conservative estimates.

Though it’ll be awful for the entire world, the newly liberated Antarctic ice melt will affect some of us more than others. The Northern Hemisphere (including, of course, North America) will be hit particularly hard: As Antarctica melts, it exercises less gravitational pull on the seas, and will head northward.

Researchers have made it pretty clear that the West Antarctic ice sheet’s collapse is unstoppable. The Totten Glacier has almost reached that same point. “The ice loss to the ocean may soon be irreversible unless atmospheric and oceanic conditions change so that snowfall outpaces coastal melting,” the researchers said in a press release. So with climate change moving forward — something that’s not likely to change anytime soon — it’s probably too late for both of these ice blobs. “[I]t’s difficult to see how a process that starts now would be reversed, or reversible, in a warming world,” one of the study’s coauthors, Martin Siegert, told Mooney.

So maybe just cross your fingers and hope that your grandchildren are born with gills.

Source:
The melting of Antarctica was already really bad. It just got worse.

, The Washington Post.

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A second giant blob of Antarctic ice is getting ready to drown us

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Here’s What Will Happen If Antarctica Melts

by GeorgiaRocha Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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When we talk about global warming at the poles, the Arctic tends to get more press than the Antarctic, because it’s happening faster there than anywhere else on Earth. But Antarctica is still a juggernaut. As ice sheets there collapse—a process some scientists now see as irreversible—global sea level could rise 10 feet. The complete meltdown could take hundreds of years, but if you live anywhere near the coast, it’s not hard to imagine why my colleague Chris Mooney called that discovery a “holy shit moment for global warming.”

Tonight, our friends at VICE will kick off their third season of documentaries on HBO, and they’re headed to Antarctica to get a close-up look at the potentially catastrophic changes underway there. We’ll also hear from Vice President Joe Biden, who says denying climate change is “like denying gravity.” Check out the trailer above; the show airs tonight at 11pm ET.

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Here’s What Will Happen If Antarctica Melts

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How Fox and CNN Blew It on the Antarctic Climate Disaster

by PJADongenhuvm Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Monday’s blockbuster climate news was that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is broken—already destabilized by irrevocable melting that foreshadows a slow-motion collapse. Up to 13 feet of sea-level rise might be the result. Two separate scientific papers, in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, found this unstoppable decline was a result of a dangerous feedback loop driven by the warming waters related to climate change: higher temperatures will result in melting ice that will, in turn, expose an even greater amount of ice to higher sea temperatures. Scientists said the process could take centuries, even a millennium, but could ultimately rewrite the world’s coastlines.

That sounds like pretty big stuff to cover in the news, right? The science itself got a ton of coverage in the print media and online. You’d think it might also deserve a bit of cable news airtime, using some good old fashioned explanatory journalism?

But as the world took in the news, cable news channels largely avoided giving their viewers a proper rundown of the science.

I took to the TV news section of the Internet Archive, which makes television news shows searchable via closed captions, and then cross-referenced my findings with LexisNexis—the online news database that provides transcripts of many cable shows. And I looked at CNN’s own transcript portal.

The results? CNN and Fox News didn’t cover the Antarctica story on air at all on Monday or Tuesday, while MSNBC covered it several times. Just one segment—on MSNBC—took the Antarctica news and produced it into a full story on its own terms, and that was the day after the news broke.

Beyond that, what news there was about climate change focused on the 2016 presidential race, in particular Marco Rubio’s recent comments to ABC’s “This Week.” “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it,” he told interviewer Jonathan Karl (in New Hampshire, no less). These comments sparked a myriad of cookie-cutter round-table discussions on cable news. Admittedly, it is a great, revealing interview, in which Rubio produces some strong language on climate change intended to cement his conservative credentials, and the whole thing is well worth watching in full: “I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy,” he said.

Here’s more detail about how each cable network covered climate change in the wake of the Antarctica findings:

Fox News

There was no mention of Antarctic melting on Fox News on Monday or Tuesday. Around 2:15 pm on Monday—more than an hour after NASA’s press conference—The Real Story With Gretchen Carlson (with Shannon Bream filling in) covered the Rubio climate story instead. “What Senator Rubio was not saying was that he believes that climate change—he’s saying that climate change is not manmade. That belies 97 percent of the world’s climatologists,” Bream’s guest Julie Roginskyâ&#128;&#139; bravely (and rightly) contended. “There is a lot of debate still about that,” Bream quickly reminded her audience, before springing away to talk about Rand Paul, who is “also in the mix for 2016.” For a moment there, I thought we might inch closer to the science.

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How Fox and CNN Blew It on the Antarctic Climate Disaster

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The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

by AllieMcdaniels Posted on May 12, 2014

merlot point

The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

By

Ed Mandarina

|

Evgeny Kovalev spb

It’s Monday, and you probably wanted to ease into the week with a post about cute animals or something. Instead, today scientists broke the news that the West Antarctic ice sheet is now in irreversible collapse, meaning a likely 10 to 15 foot global sea-level rise in coming centuries.

Before you get cranking on that ark (maybe you can have those cute animals after all!), let’s take a deep breath. There’s still uncertainty about how cataclysmic this particular cataclysm is. New York Times blogger Andy Revkin points out that “collapse” is a relative term in geological affairs. Both sets of researchers behind the two separate studies, upcoming in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, agree that we could have a good century or two of continued incremental rise before the melt starts to really speed up. It might take anywhere between 200 and 1,000 years before the ice in question is totally gone and the seas have swallowed all the low-lying land from the Jersey Shore to the Philippines.

But according to this new research, there’s no question that it’s going to happen. An upwelling of warm ocean water has made this ice sheet in western Antarctica, which is the largest cache of grounded ice left in the world, particularly unstable. It already releases as much glacial melt every year as leaked by the whole of Greenland. The tepid upwelling that is causing the trouble is the result of high winds over Antarctica, probably intensified by climate change; atmospheric warming and ozone depletion over the continent can’t have helped either.

NASA/Eric RignotCritical glaciers in Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea, including Thwaites, which scientists have identified as the cork in this proverbial wine bottle. Click to embiggen.

None of this should come as a total shock. Scientists have been predicting the possible collapse of these tricky glaciers for years, most notably glaciologist John Mercer, who in 1968 called the West Antarctica sheet a “uniquely vulnerable and unstable body of ice.”

Now scientists report they have proof that the process is well and truly under way. The main warning sign was an accelerated glacial flow in the past few decades, which suggests that ice loss is happening fast enough it will be impossible to arrest, as the New York Times explains:

At this point, a decrease in the melt rate back to earlier levels would be “too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet,” said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new paper in Science. “There’s no stabilization mechanism.”

We “have passed the point of no return,” affirmed the second study’s lead author, Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at UC Irvine and NASA. In a press conference Monday morning, Rignot invoked the image of wine in a corked bottle. The glaciers, which rest in a scoop of land that dips below sea level, are separated from the Southern Seas by a little bit of ice on the edge of the shelf — the stopper. Once that melts away, there’s little to prevent the remaining ice from flowing out and floating into deeper waters, where it will be exposed to more upwelling warm seawater.

“We can tell that the bottle has been uncorked,” Rignot said in the press conference — giving the sentence a grimmer spin than it tends to get at your average picnic or dinner party. Now it’s just a matter of how fast the wine, a.k.a top vintage Antarctic meltwater, runs out into the oceans. Plus, ice is still streaming off the rest of Antarctica and Greenland, where other glaciers may not be far from chronic instability themselves. The total sea-level rise, whenever it happens, stands to kick us out of our coastal cities once and for all.

All of which has me thinking I could use a glass myself.


Source
Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans as Antarctic Ice Melts, New York Times
Western Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Has Already Begun, Scientists Warn, The Guardian
The “Unstable” West Antarctic Ice Sheet: A Primer, NASA

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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The West Antarctic glaciers are breaking up with us

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Another ship gets stuck in Antarctic ice, and it still doesn’t disprove global warming

by HolleyN22wck Posted on January 7, 2014

Another ship gets stuck in Antarctic ice, and it still doesn’t disprove global warming

By

Arctic Climate Change, Economy and Society

The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, before it got stuck.

We told you last week about a Russian icebreaker trapped in Antarctic sea ice, and how this event doesn’t mean climate change is magically not happening.

Now a Chinese icebreaker sent to rescue the Russian icebreaker is also stuck in sea ice, and this still doesn’t mean climate change is magically not happening.

We’ve explained previously that the relatively thin crust of Antarctic sea ice appears to be growing, even as glaciers and ice sheets in the Antarctic melt and as Arctic sea ice turns to seawater. The “paradox of Antarctic sea ice” might, counterintuitively, be linked to climate change.

But the current sea-ice strandings cannot be blamed on climate change, nor on the lack of climate change. Rather, the unusual sea-ice conditions in this area of the Antarctic appear to be the result of a collision in 2010 between an iceberg and the edge of a glacier, according to Chris Turney, head of a scientific team that was rescued from the Russian icebreaker last week by helicopter.

Turney writes in The Guardian:

Let’s be clear. Us becoming locked in ice was not caused by climate change. Instead it seems to have been an aftershock of the arrival of iceberg B09B which triggered a massive reconfiguration of sea ice in the area.

Now an American icebreaker, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star, is heading to the area with the intention of freeing the Russian and Chinese vessels. Let’s hope it doesn’t get stuck as well — but even if it does, it won’t tell us a damn thing about climate change.


Source
Antarctic expedition: ‘This wasn’t a tourist trip. It was all about science – and it was worth it’, The Guardian

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Another ship gets stuck in Antarctic ice, and it still doesn’t disprove global warming

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