A changing climate is upon us, with more frequent land and marine heatwaves, forest fires, atmospheric rivers and floods. For some, it is the backdrop to day-to-day life, but for a growing number of people it is a life-changing reality.
It is now more remarkable when a year is not the hottest since our species began to develop civilisations.
Australian scientists have made dire projections about what Antarctica’s melting ice will do to global ocean health without rapid emissions cuts this decade.
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is in the news again. We are fascinated with it because it is the Godzilla of glaciers, 80 miles across and as massive as Florida. If the ice sheet holding it back were to melt, and if Thwaites plopped into the ocean, it would all by itself raise sea level two feet. It functions, however, to hold back other glaciers and ice formations, which in its absence would themselves head for the sea. If that happened you would be talking about ten feet of sea level rise. The last time
Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world’s largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis shows.
Scientists at institutions in the US and Australia on Friday published a set of unprecedented ocean observations near the largest glacier of the largest ice sheet in the world: Totten glacier, East Antarctica. And the result was a troubling confirmation of what scientists already feared – Totten is melting from below.
Recently, a study published by NASA scientists in the Journal of Glaciology made the surprising claim that Antarctica is gaining more ice than it has lost. The study, led by Jay Zwally, a NASA glaciologist, claimed that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began …
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