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A new study sheds light on how much ice could be lost around Antarctica if the international community fails to urgently contain global warming emissions, reinforcing the case for stronger climate policies.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that more than a third of the area of all Antarctic ice shelves – including 67% of the area in the Antarctic Peninsula – is at risk of collapse if global temperatures rise to 4 ° C above pre-industrial levels.
An ice shelf, as NASA explains, “is a thick, floating sheet of ice that forms where a glacier or ice flows along a coastline.” They only occur in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada and the Russian Arctic – and play a key role in limiting sea level rise.
“Ice shelves are important buffers that prevent land-based glaciers from flowing freely into the ocean and contribute to sea level rise,” Ella Gilbert, the study’s lead author, explained in a statement. “When they collapse, it’s like taking a giant cork from a bottle, allowing unimaginable amounts of water to flow from glaciers into the sea.”
“We know that when molten ice builds up on the surface of ice shelves, the ice can break and collapse spectacularly,” added Gilbert, a researcher at the University of Reading. “Previous research has given us a bigger picture in terms of predicting the deterioration of the Antarctic ice shelf, but our new study uses the latest modeling techniques to fill in the finer details and provide more accurate projections.”
Gilbert and co-author Christoph Kittel of the Belgian University of Liège conclude that limiting the global temperature rise to 2 ° C instead of 4 ° C would halve the risk area.
“At 1.5 ° C, only 14% of Antarctica’s ice shelf would be endangered,” noted Gilbert The conversation
While the 2015 Paris climate agreement aims to keep the temperature rise “well below” 2 ° C, with a more ambitious target of 1.5 ° C, current emissions reduction plans are dramatically in contradiction with both targets, according to an analysis by the United Nations.
Gilbert said Thursday that the findings of their new study “underscore the importance of limiting global temperature rises as outlined in the Paris Agreement if we are to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including sea level rise.”
“If temperatures continue to rise at the current rate,” she said, “we could lose more Antarctic ice shelves in the coming decades.”
The researchers warn that Larsen C – the largest remaining ice shelf in the Antarctic Peninsula – and the Shackleton, Pine Island and Wilkins ice shelves are most at risk below 4 ° C due to their geographic location and runoff forecasts.
“Limiting warming isn’t just good for Antarctica – preserving ice shelves means less global sea-level rise, which is good for all of us,” Gilbert added.
Low-lying coastal areas such as small island states of Vanuatu and Tuvalu in the South Pacific are most at risk from sea level rise, Gilbert said. CNN
However, “coastal areas around the world would be vulnerable,” she warned, “and countries with fewer resources available to mitigate and adapt to sea-level rise will get worse.”
Research published in February detailing the projections of the Fifth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and that of the agency Special Report on the Ocean and the Cryosphere in a Changing Climate found that sea level rise predictions for this century are “on the money when compared to satellite and tide observations”.
A co-author of that study, John Church of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, said at the time that “if we continue with large sustained emissions as we are today, we will commit the world to meters of sea level rise. in the coming centuries. “
The parties to the Paris Agreement are in the process of updating their emission reduction commitments – known as nationally determined contributions – in the run-up to the United Nations climate summit in November, known as COP26.
This article has been reposted from EcoWatch via Common Dreams.
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