Yesterday , fresh - published scientific grounds revealed that the west Antarctic ice sheet is “ collapsing . ”In fact , this meth thawing is moderately much inevitable , and will intend up to 4 inches of sea level rise . What most news story provide out , though , was the timeline for this change to our shoreline .
https://gizmodo.com/a-new-study-indicates-that-the-west-antarctic-ice-sheet-1575206976
Writing at DotEarth , environmental diary keeper Andrew Revkin admonish that we need to remember that the situation is dire , but the timescales are long :
Sometime between 200 and 900 years from now the rate of chicken feed personnel casualty from this glacier could gain a book sufficient to lift ocean level about 4 in ( 100 millimeters ) a century . At that level , fit in to the newspaper , ice departure could pluck up steam . But in a telephone conversation , [ paper author ] Joughin said the modeling was not reliable enough to say how much , how soon .
“ Collapse is a upright scientific Book , ” he told me , “ but mayhap it ’s kind of a bad word ” in the context of news . There ’s more on this work ina well - written tidings liberation from Joughin ’s university .
NASA has posteda heap of helpful context and descriptionofthe Geophysical Research Letters paper , written byEric Rignotat the University of California , Irvine , and collaborators .
Rignot also acknowledged the job with the intelligence “ collapse ” in a conversation with Revkin :
Collapse in the imagination of most people sounds like a catastrophic outcome that is give out to occur in the next few years . We are babble about a retreat that is unstoppable because we think we have enough evidence to say that these glacier will keep retreating for decades and even centuries to descend … . We ’re talk about a irksome degradation of ice in this part of Antarctica .
They fundamental takeaway here is that this degradation is unstoppable . There ’s nothing we can do to forbid hundreds of years of melt . We wo n’t see it in our lifetimes , but we ’ve irrevocably altered the Earth ’s coastal ecosystems .
To interpret the full complexity of the situation , Revkin commend “ The ‘ Unstable ’ West Antarctic Ice Sheet : A Primer . “
AntarcticaClimate changeScience
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