We talk about ice cream a lot here at Earther – or more specifically, its growing absence. A new study highlights what is happening to the planet perspective. W.While I can tell you that the results show that 1.2 trillion tons of ice have disappeared every year since 1994, it’s a lot easier to capture as a visual image.
That ice cube towers over there 10 kilometers into the air like an umbrella above Manhattan and stretches across a huge stretch of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. Which’How much we have lost burning fossil fuels on average per year the past two decades. The skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown are toothpicks. More ominously, the cube gets bigger as the ice loss accelerates.
Ice cube illustration is bound to a study published in the Cryosphere on Monday, that looks at the state of the cryosphere. A team of scientists from across the UK used satellite measurements and climate models to investigate what’s happening in every nook and cranny of ice around the world. While most studies focus on sea ice or on-land ice, the new article looks at both to give us a better understanding of how much ice has melted by climate change.
“An enormous international effort has been made to study individual regions, such as glaciers spread across the planet, the Arctic ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice floating in the Arctic and Southern oceans, “Tom Slater, the study of lead author and ice researcher at the University of Leeds, said in an email. “We felt that there was now enough data to combine these efforts and investigate all the ice lost from the planet. “
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Show the results Arctic sea ice is the fastest disappearing ice in the world. A whopping 7.6 trillion tons turned to liquid from 1994 to 2017, the period for which the study had data. This was followed by Antarctic ice shelves, which have seen 6.5 trillion tons of ice disappear, sometimes catastrophically. The most recent example is Iceberg A68, a Delaware-sized piece of ice tore off the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017 and has since wandered the southern and Atlantic oceans. It most recently had a near drop-in with an environmentally sensitive island.
But other, more insidious forms of ice shelf drama are underway. The study doesn’t just look at ice area; it too looks at ice volume. And the most shocking effects on ice shelves happen below the surface. Ice shelves protrude above the ocean and hold back glaciers on land ice sheets. But in West Antarctica, satellite and direct observations show hot water has eaten away on ice shelves and could eventually cause them to collapse. When that happens, sea level rise will accelerate and will not stop for centuries; the ice in West Antarctica could raise the sea by more than 3 meters.
Land glaciers in Alaska, the Himalayas and elsewhere are also the main driver of sea level rise, just like the glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland. They are all disappearing at an alarming rate. The threat of water loss in regions dependent on glacier and snow melt is certain an acute problem. Likewise, the disappearance of sea ice and its consequences traditional ways of life in the Arctic. And an increasing but accelerating rise in sea level can occur dramatically when hurricanes roar ashore and trigger a storm surge barrierfurther inland thanks to the climate change-driven boost. Perhaps most ominously, the melting is just a small aspect of the changes taking place.
“We found that only about 3% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions was required to melt all this ice, a surprisingly small amount of energy to melt such a large amount of ice, which is a disproportionate amount of energy. effect on our environment, ‘said Slater.
In that light, the giant ice cube from hell shows only a small part of the impact of human activities on the planet.