12/3/2023 0 Comments Antarctic ice shelf breaking offIf we don’t control emissions and the planet warms 9✯, a recent report from NOAA and other agencies says, there’s a 50 percent chance of seas rising more than three feet by 2100-and a 10 percent chance of them rising more than six feet. Two feet would submerge much of the Maldives and other small island nations.īut even by 2100 the sea level rise could be greater than two feet. homes on all its coasts, but particularly in the East and Gulf regions, could find themselves flooding as often as weekly. With seas a foot higher, hundreds of thousands of U.S. coasts on average will likely see a foot of sea level rise by 2050 and two feet by 2100, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected earlier this year.Īlready, some 110 million people worldwide live in zones vulnerable to flooding by high tides. East Coast, for example, is hit harder in part because the Gulf Stream is slowing and funneling less water away from the coast. Some regions are seeing a faster rise than the global average. The IPCC projected with “medium confidence” that it would rise another 15 to 30 inches by 2100, and will keep rising for centuries. In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2021, scientists determined global average sea level is now rising around 0.15 inch (3.7 millimeters) each year. Globally, seas have risen a little over 8 inches since 1900, but the rise is accelerating: A quarter of it has happened since 2006. We just have to make the decision, even with some uncertainty.” “It’s not a question of if seas will rise two feet, it’s when. Siders, a sociologist at the University of Delaware. Most coastal communities are struggling even to acknowledge the reality, says A.R. Though a precise forecast is impossible, it's clear where sea level is headed: Up, possibly a lot, possibly soon. It could change the game of what we need to do by the end of the century” and beyond to adapt to sea level rise, he says-from building “hard” protection like seawalls or levees, to retreating from the coast. “All by itself, it could change the story. “It is the most important glacier in the world,” says Julia Wellner, a marine geologist at the University of Houston.Īnd the trajectory it seems to be on is “alarming,” says University of Colorado glaciologist Ted Scambos, who co-leads a major multi-year research program at Thwaites. And because of some crucial, frightening quirks of geology and geography, Thwaites could one day become one of the most significant drivers of global sea level rise. It’s also a bottleneck protecting the larger West Antarctic ice sheet, which would raise sea level 10 feet if it were to melt completely. The size of Florida, the Thwaites Glacier holds enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet. Their December 2021 discovery suggested the Thwaites ice shelf could disintegrate within the decade, leaving the enormous and unusually precarious glacier unprotected. Their incipient demise, scientists fear, could be the beginning of more ice loss-and much more sea level rise that would affect countries all over the world.ĭespite Conger’s collapse, the most pressing concern is still the ice shelves fringing West Antarctica, where Pettit works. The unexpected collapse highlighted the importance of-and uncertainty about-the continent’s ice shelves, which act like bottle stoppers controlling the flow of ice from land to sea. As a late Austral summer heat wave brought extraordinary temperatures and high winds to the region, the Conger ice shelf disintegrated within days. In March, East Antarctica-the other, colder side of the continent-saw its first-ever ice-shelf collapse. But to Pettit, it signified something even scarier: the start of ice shelf's disintegration, which is a step toward a larger disintegration of the glacier itself. It was unlikely the cracks would grow fast enough to endanger them. It was plenty safe to plan a camp there, they thought.īut last December, when they were preparing to go to the camp, the images revealed enormous cracks in the ice pointing straight at it. Two years before, when she and her colleagues were deciding where to put their research camp, the entire floating ice shelf-a tongue of ice poking out from the enormous glacier behind it-was solid. All scientist Erin Pettit could see when she looked at the satellite photos of the ice shelf in front of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica was the giant crack that stretched across most of the image.
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