Ross Ice Shelf at the Bay of Whales
Katherine Bagley at InsideClimate News writes
Antarctica's Melting Edges Bad News for Sea Level Rise. "Within a lifetime of people who read this story many of these shelves will be gone ... This is real rapid environmental change," says reviewer of new study:
The edges of Antarctica's ice sheets have been thinning at a rapid rate over the past decade—up to 70 percent faster than average in some spots—due to warming oceans and air.
Known technically as ice shelves, these edges float just offshore in bays or fjords and act as barriers that keep larger, land-based ice sheets from slipping into the ocean. Once they are gone, there will be nothing to hold back the continent-sized ice masses from sliding into the warmer oceans and melting, raising sea levels precipitously.
According to a new study published in the journal Science this week, this could happen by the end of the century.
"Within a lifetime of people who read this story, many of these shelves will be gone," said Andrew Shepherd, a polar scientist at the University of Leeds who reviewed the study before publication. "This is real, rapid environmental change. These shelves have been around for 10,000 years. It is a classic example of how drastically you can disturb the planet with small changes."
Researchers have historically focused their attention on land-based ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica because they are massive contributors to sea level rise, said Fernando Paolo, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the lead author of the new paper.
When ice shelves melt, however, they don't raise sea levels directly because they are already in the ocean. But Paolo calls them an "overlooked, yet fundamental piece in the whole sea level rise process." Monitoring them could yield clues as to when this climate impact will go from bad to worse.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Will The Media Finally Report That The Surge Has Failed?
The centerpiece of John McCain's campaign is that "the surge is working" in Iraq. He has repeated this lie hundreds of times on the trail, and in doing so, he has rarely been challenged. The press has largely reported his contention as fact, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The surge, the president's "New Way Forward," was supposed to provide stability, promote political progress, and otherwise assist the Iraqi government in meeting certain benchmarks. As to those expressed goals, the surge has, by any measure, failed.
Yet John McCain, this administration, and members of the press who dutifully repeated their spin as fact maintain that the surge "worked" because there has been, in the last several months, a sharp decline in violence. The reality presents a much more complex situation.
Tweet of the Day
Less crying over whether a poor student can get into an Ivy, more coverage of dismantling of publics that educate 75% of college students.
— @rortybomb
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: Three main topics of conversation today: the German plane crash; the situation in Yemen, and; the budget vote-o-rama and the continuing fight over filibuster reform. And that's really about it! Of course, we fill in the blanks with some homework reading assignments on Yemen & Saud-ish Arabia, and have an extended conversation about what the vote-a-rama tells us about the need for filibuster reform and the process by which it might be implemented. Deep in the weeds today!
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