We talk about ice many here on Earth – or more precisely, its growing absence. A new study highlights what is happening to the planet perspective. WWhile I can tell you that the results show 1.2 trillion tons of ice missing every year since 1994, it is much easier to understand visually.
That ice cube rises there 10 miles in the sky, like a shadow of sunshine over Manhattan and stretches over a huge area of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. That’how much I lost from burning fossil fuels on average per year the last two decades. Financial District and Midtown skyscrapers are toothpicks. More threatening the cube is growing as the ice losses accelerate.
Illustration of ice cube is related to a study published in Cryosphere Monday, that concerns, uh, the state of the cryosphere. A team of scientists from the UK used satellite measurements and climate models to explore what is happening in every corner of the globe. While most studies focus on either sea ice or land ice, the new paper looks at both to give us a better understanding of the amount of melted ice due to climate change.
“It was a huge international effort to study individual regions, like glaciers have spread around the planet, polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, ice shelves floating around Antarctica and sea ice heading into the Arctic and southern oceans, ”said Tom Slater. lead author and ice researcher at the University of Leeds, he said in an email. “I feel that there is now enough data to be able to combine these efforts and examine all the ice that is lost from the planet. ”
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The results show Arctic sea ice it is the fastest disappearing ice on the planet. An astonishing 7.6 trillion tons turned into liquid from 1994 to 2017, the period for which the study had data. Antarctic ice shelves followed, seeing 6.5 trillion tons of ice disappear, sometimes catastrophically. The most recent example is the Iceberg A68, a piece of ice the size of Delaware snatched the Larsen C ice shelf. in 2017 and he has since wandered the southern and Atlantic oceans. This one most recently had a run-in close with an ecologically sensitive island.
But other more insidious forms of drama on ice shelves are in full swing. The study is not just about the ice; also he looked at the volume of ice. And the most shocking effects on ice shelves it happens below the surface. Ice shelves protrude across the ocean, trapping glaciers on ice sheets on land. But in West Antarctica, satellite and direct observations show hot water ate to ice shelves and could eventually cause them to collapse. If this happens, sea level rise will accelerate and not stop for centuries; ice in western Antarctica could raise the seas by more than 3 meters.
Land glaciers in Alaska, the Himalayas and elsewhere are also major factors in sea level rise, just like the glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland. They all disappear at an alarming rate. The threat of water loss in glacier-based regions and melting snow is certainly an acute concern. So is the disappearance of sea ice and its impact on it traditional ways of life in the Arctic. And the incremental but accelerated rise in sea level can play dramatically when hurricanes howl ashore, pushingfurther inland, due to the momentum of climate change. Perhaps worst of all, melting is only a small aspect of the changes that are taking place.
“We found that it took only about 3% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions to melt all this ice, a surprisingly low amount of energy to melt such a large amount of ice, which has a disproportionately large effect on our environment, Slater said.
In this light, the giant ice cube in hell shows only a small part of the impact of human activities on the planet.