Antarctic Glaciers
Note: I appear to have written this a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't posted it. I probably thought I had something else to say, but...
It's not every week that I see an article with a title like "The Doomsday Glacier". It was one of the links Firefox puts on my "new tab" page, and was originally published on May 9, 2017 in Rolling Stone. So naturally I went off looking for more recent -- and more accurate -- information.
It seems that the Thwaites Glacier and nearby Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica are melting, and rather quickly. Pine Island is, in fact, the fastest-melting and fastest-flowing (4km/year in 2014, which is the most recent number I could find on short notice) glacier in Antarctica; it's responsible for about a quarter of Antarctica's ice loss. The Thwaites is slower (2km/y), but wider. Both are accelerating -- their speed has doubled over the last 30 years or so.
That's a problem, because it looks as though the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be becoming unstable, which could lead to a collapse. You see, the layer of bedrock that the ice sheet is sitting on is below sea level, and slopes down the farther you go inland. And liquid water is heavier than ice.
It now appears that the processes leading to a collapse are unstoppable; the only question is whether it will take a thousand years, or a hundred. We could be looking at a sea level rise somewhere between two or three feet and two or three meters by the end of the century. Resources
...in no particular order; mostly from January 18th...
- Scientists Are Racing to Figure Out Why This Giant Glacier in Antarctica Is Melting So Fast | Live Science
- Thwaites Glacier - Wikipedia
- Cavity in Antarctica Glacier Is 2/3 the Size of Manhattan, Scientists Say - NYT
- ITGC Thwaites Glacier (65cm = 25")
- ITGC Thwaites Glacier " New study provides first evidence that thinning Antarctic ice shelves _instantaneously_ result in more ice into the sea "
- West Antarctic ice shelf breaking up from the inside out
- Pine Island Glacier - Wikipedia
- The Doomsday Glacier is the article that got me started
- Pine Island Glacier flows at rates of up to 4000 m per year
- Marine ice sheet instability - Wikipedia
- Fire and Ice (poem) I don't think anyone has set this to music. Maybe somebody should.
[Crossposted from mdlbear.dreamwidth.org, where it has
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