We talk about ice much here in Earther, or more specifically, the growing absence of it. A new study highlights what is happening on the planet perspective. Walthough I can tell you that the results show that 1.2 trillion tons of ice have been missing every year since 1994, it is much easier to understand as a visual.
This ice cube up there is toasted 6 miles away (6 miles) to the sky like a parasol over Manhattan and stretches over a huge strip of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. This’s how much we have lost on average in burning fossil fuels per year the last two decades. The skyscrapers of the financial district and Midtown are choppy. More ominously, the cube is getting bigger as the ice loss accelerates.
The illustration of the ice cube is tied to a study published in the cryosphere on Monday the state of the cryosphere is looked at. A team of scientists from across the UK used satellite measurements and climate models to explore what is happening in every corner of the ice around the world. While most studies focus on sea ice or ice on land, the new paper discusses both to give us a better understanding of how much ice has melted due to climate change.
“There has been a great international effort to study individual regions, as glaciers spanning the planet, polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting into the Arctic and southern oceans, “said Tom Slater, a researcher at the study said in an email the lead author and ice researcher at the University of Leeds. “We thought that now there was enough data to be able to combine these efforts and examine all the ice that is lost from the planet. “
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The results are displayed Arctic sea ice it is the fastest disappearing ice on the planet. An impressive 7.6 trillion tonnes has become liquid from 1994 to 2017, a period from which data were obtained. Then there were the Antarctic ice shelves, which have seen 6.5 trillion tons of ice disappear, sometimes catastrophically. The most recent example is Iceberg A68, a piece of ice the size of Delaware booted the Larsen C ice shelf. in 2017 i since then it has roamed the South and Atlantic Oceans. That more recently it had almost a second place an ecologically sensitive island.
But there are other more insidious forms of drama on ice platforms. The study not only contemplates the ice zone; too look at the volume of ice. And the most impactful impacts on ice platforms they are passing under the surface. Ice platforms protrude over the ocean, slowing glaciers over layers of ice on the ground. But in West Antarctica, direct and satellite observations are shown the warm water has been eaten away on ice platforms and could eventually cause the collapse. If this happens, sea level rise will accelerate and not stop for centuries; the ice of West Antarctica could raise the seas to more than 3 meters.
Terrestrial glaciers in Alaska, the Himalayas and elsewhere are also the main drivers of rising sea levels. as well as the glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland. They all disappear at an alarming rate. The threat of water loss in regions that depend on glaciers and melting snow is certainly an acute concern. So is the disappearance of sea ice and its impact traditional ways of life in the Arctic. And the incremental, but accelerated, rise in sea level can be played out dramatically when hurricanes roar on land, pushing the storminland thanks to the momentum driven by climate change. Perhaps more ominously, the merger is only a small aspect of the changes that are taking place.
“We discovered that it only took about 3% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions to melt all this ice, a surprisingly small amount of energy to melt such a large amount of ice, which has a disproportionately large effect on our environment, ”Slater said.
In this light, the giant ice cube of hell shows only a small portion of the impact of human activities on the planet.