Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Fire, Got That, What About Ice?

It's melting.  Not exactly news, especially since last week, but the studies keep coming in.  According to NBC News:"Three years' worth of readings from the European Space Agency's CryoSat 2 satellite indicate that Antarctica's ice sheets are losing 159 billion tons of ice per year — which is twice as much as the estimates from previous altimeter surveys."  (There's more details in this BBC story, but the numbers are in metrics.)

The same story references another study, of Greenland: "A study published Sunday by Nature Geoscience reports that the canyons beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet are deeper and longer than previously thought. That suggests that there's more ice on the northern land mass available for thawing in a warming world, with the result that Greenland's future contribution to sea level rise could exceed past estimates."

Now how about ice and fire together? "New research on the effects of ice sheet melt in the Antarctic shows climate change is deforming the Earth’s crust, potentially prompting volcanic activity that could cause global sea-levels to rise much more than predicted."

That's if the volcanoes are under the ice and an eruption accelerates the melt.  There are possible sites in Alaska and Antarctica.  This story ends with the chilling news that Australian scientists who have been studying their fairly near neighbor of Antarctica may not be able to continue due to cutbacks in government funding.  Australia has yo-yoed back from being led by climate crisis believers to climate crisis deniers.

The response of the earth's crust to the redistribution of weight (as ice melts into oceans) and perhaps even to atmospheric temperature is another unknown, in this utterly interrelated planetary ecology.  But volcanoes would be one manifestation, earthquakes another.

The new Antarctic study comports with the results of studies released and referenced here in the past week or two.  The conclusion of all the studies is that while scientists cannot yet predict how fast the sea levels will rise, they're now pretty damn sure they are going to rise, certainly enough to threaten coastal cities worldwide and islands and even states (Florida) low in the water.  And maybe by a lot more, and maybe a lot faster.

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