Antarctica Is Melting, and Giant Ice Cracks Are Just the Start

[Guest Nicole]

We went to Antarctica to understand how changes to its vast ice sheet might affect the world. Flowing lineson these maps show how the ice is moving.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/18/climate/antarctica-ice-melt-climate-change.html?emc=edit_ta_20170518&nl=top-stories&nlid=54907543&ref=cta&_r=0

[Guest Nicole]

 

This story appears in the July 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Seen from above, the Pine Island Ice Shelf is a slow-motion train wreck. Its buckled surface is scarred by thousands of large crevasses. Its edges are shredded by rifts a quarter mile across. In 2015 and 2016 a 225-square-mile chunk of it broke off the end and drifted away on the Amundsen Sea. The water there has warmed by more than a degree Fahrenheit over the past few decades, and the rate at which ice is melting and calving has quadrupled.

On the Antarctic Peninsula, the warming has been far greater—nearly five degrees on average. That’s why a Delaware-size iceberg is poised to break off the Larsen C Ice Shelf and why smaller ice shelves on the peninsula have long since disintegrated entirely into the waters of the Weddell Sea. But around the Amundsen Sea, a thousand miles to the southwest on the Pacific coast of Antarctica, the glaciers are far larger and the stakes far higher. They affect the entire planet.

Read more: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/07/antarctica-sea-level-rise-climate-change/

[Guest]

It is almost as if there are mountains of water just lying ready, soon to inundate us all.

I just had the terrifying thought - What if scientists calculations were WRONG.... and the amount of frozen LITERAL mountains of pure water in Antartica is so large that it covers the majority of land leaving only certain mountain ranges.

Maybe we should all start trying to buy very high mountain property in the hopes that it will one day become beach front property. 

@Nicole @Marra McDonald Johnson

[Guest Nicole]

Probably...

Antarctic ice is melting faster. Coastal cities need to prepare — now.

A glacier in Half Moon Bay, Antarctica, on Feb. 18. (Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)

SCIENTISTS HAVE given Antarctica a thorough physical exam. The results are grim. The continent is shedding weight at an astonishing and accelerating rate, and that is alarming news for anyone living near a major body of water — in other words, much of humanity.

A landmark study published last week in the journal Nature combined the work of 80 scientists from 42 institutions, including NASA, and found that, since 1992, Antarctica has lost nearly 3 trillion tons of ice, enough to raise sea levels by a little less than a centimeter. Forty percent of that ice loss occurred in the past five years. The ice-loss rate is now triple what it was a decade ago.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/antarctic-ice-is-melting-faster-coastal-cities-need-to-prepare--now/2018/06/22/9e1e83b6-74af-11e8-805c-4b67019fcfe4_story.html?utm_term=.14e91181385f

[Mic Drop]

'Not a good sign:' Antarctica, Arctic simultaneously 70 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal

https://www.timesofisrael.com/not-a-good-sign-antarctica-arctic-simultaneously-70-and-50-degrees-above-normal/

Quote

Both Lazzara and Meier said what happened in Antarctica is probably just a random weather event and not a sign of climate change. But if it happens again or repeatedly then it might be something to worry about and part of global warming, they said.

The Antarctic warm spell was first reported by The Washington Post.

The Antarctic continent as a whole on Friday was about 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than a baseline temperature between 1979 and 2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, based on U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather models. That 8-degree heating over an already warmed-up average is unusual, think of it as if the entire United States was 8 degrees hotter than normal, Meier said.

At the same time, on Friday the Arctic as a whole was 6 degrees (3.3 degrees) warmer than the 1979 to 2000 average.

 

[Pudgy]

Short term panic for those without historical perspective.

We are still coming out of an ice age.

What is “normal” to us is silly short-sightedness.

10,000 years ago glaciers came down to Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and since then it has been warming up.

10,000 years ago the Oceans of Earth were ALL at least 400 feet LOWER than they are now.

Adapt.

….. the folks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did.