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A new study highlights how much ice could be lost around Antarctica if the international community fails to urgently control global warming emissions, arguing for bolder climate policies.
The study, published in the journal on Thursday Geophysical research letters, found that more than a third of all Antarctic ice shelves – including 67% of the Antarctic Peninsula – could risk collapsing if global temperatures rose to 4 ° C above pre-industrial levels.
An ice shelf, as NASA explains, “is a thick, floating plate of ice that forms where a glacier or ice flows along a coast.” They are found only in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada and the Russian Arctic – and play a key role in limiting sea level rise.
“Ice shelves are important buffers that prevent land glaciers from flowing freely into the ocean and contributing to rising sea levels,” Ella Gilbert, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “When they collapse, it’s like a huge stopper that is taken out of a bottle, allowing unimaginable amounts of water from glaciers to pour into the sea.”
“We know that when melted ice accumulates on the surface of ice shelves, it can cause them to fracture and collapse dramatically,” added Gilbert, a researcher at the University of Reading. “Previous research has given us a broader picture of predicting the decline of the Antarctic ice shelf, but our new study uses the latest modeling techniques to complete finer detail and provide more accurate projections.”
Gilbert and co-author Christoph Kittel of the University of Liège in Belgium concluded that limiting global temperature rise to 2 ° C rather than 4 ° C would halve the risk area.
“At 1.5 ° C, only 14% of the surface of Antarctic ice shelves would be at risk,” Gilbert said in a statement. Conversation.
While the 2015 Paris climate agreement aims to keep the temperature rise “well below” 2 ° C, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 ° C, current emission reduction plans are dramatically out of the two. objectives, according to an analysis by the United Nations.
Gilbert said on Thursday that the findings of their new study “highlight the importance of limiting global temperature rise, as set out in the Paris agreement, to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels”.
“If temperatures continue to rise at current rates,” she said, “we could lose more ice shelves in Antarctica in the coming decades.”
Researchers warn that Larsen C – the largest remaining ice shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula – as well as the Shackleton, Pine Island and Wilkins ice shelves are most at risk of under 4 ° C warming due to geography and leak predictions.
“Limiting warming will not only be good for Antarctica – keeping ice shelves means less sea level rise globally, and that’s good for all of us,” Gilbert added.
Low-lying areas, such as the small islands of Vanuatu and Tuvalu in the South Pacific Ocean, face the highest risk due to rising sea levels, Gilbert said. CNN.
“However, coastal areas around the world would be vulnerable,” she warned, “and countries with fewer resources available to mitigate and adapt to rising sea levels will have more serious consequences.”
Research published in February examining projections from Fifth evaluation report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as of the body Special report on the ocean and the cryosphere in a changing climate found that forecasts for sea level rise for this century “are on the money when tested against satellite observations and the high seas”.
A co-author of this study, John Church of the Center for Climate Change Research at the University of New South Wales, said at the time that “if we continue with high emissions in progress as we are today, we will engage the world in meters of sea level rise in the following centuries. ”
The parties to the Paris agreement are in the process of updating their emission reduction commitments – called nationally determined contributions – ahead of the UN climate summit, known as COP26.
This article has been reposted from EcoWatch through common dreams.
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