We are talk about ice a lot here on Earther – or in particular, the lack of growth from it. New study puts strike on what is happening on the planet view. W.I can tell you that the results show that 1.2 trillion tons of ice have disappeared every year since 1994, it ‘s much easier to catch it as a sight.
That ice cube up there towers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) to the sky as a sunshade over Manhattan and stretching over a large swath of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. Sin ‘s what we have lost by burning fossil fuels on average each year the last two decades. Financial District and Midtown skyscrapers are picking up teeth. Nas ominously, an a cube grows larger as ice loss accelerates.
Picture of the ice cube related to study published in the Cryosphere on Monday which will look at, uh, the state of the cryosphere. A team of scientists from across the UK used satellite measurements and climate models to study what is happening to every ice hill and cranny around the globe. While most studies focus on sea ice or onshore ice, the new paper looks at both to give us a better understanding of how much ice has melted as a result. climate change.
“There has been a major international effort to study individual sectors, for instance glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice moving in the Arctic and Southern oceans, ”said Tom Slater, the study. said the lead author and ice researcher at the University of Leeds, in an email. “We felt there was now enough data to combine these efforts and study the ice lost from the planet. ”
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The results show Arctic sea ice the fastest disappearing ice on the planet. A staggering 7.6 trillion tonnes have converted to liquid from 1994 to 2017, the time for which the study had data. That was followed by Antarctic ice shelves, in which 6.5 trillion tons of ice are disappearing, sometimes in catastrophic fashion. The latest example is an Iceberg A68, a Delaware-sized piece of ice tore it off the ice shelf of Larsen C. in 2017 and since then the seas of the South Sea and the Atlantic Ocean have disappeared. It recently there was a run nearby an ecologically sensitive island.
But there are other, more insidious forms of ice shelf drama on the horizon. The survey doesn’t just look at an ice area; e also looking at ice size. And the most devastating effects on ice shelves occurs below the surface. Ice shelves protrude across the ocean, holding glaciers back on land ice sheets. But in West Antarctica, satellite and views just show warm water has been eating away at ice shelves and could eventually fall apart. If that happens, sea level rise will accelerate and not stop for centuries; the ice in West Antarctica could raise oceans more than 10 feet (3 meters).
Terrestrial glaciers in Alaska, the Himalayas, and elsewhere are also major drivers of sea level rise, such as the Greenland glaciers and ice sheets. They all disappear at an alarming rate. The risk of rainfall is definitely in regions dependent on glaciers and avalanches very concerned. So, too, is the extinction of ice and its effects traditional lifestyles in the Arctic. And rising but faster sea levels can play out in dramatic fashion as hurricanes move ashore, pushing a storm surge.rther into the country thanks to the rise driven by climate change. Probably almost ominously, the meltdown is just a small part of the changes that are taking place.
“We found that it only took about 3% of the extra heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions to melt this ice, a remarkable small amount of energy for melting such large, impactful ice. our environment, ”Slater said.
In that light, the huge ice cube from hell shows only a small fraction of the impact of human actions on the planet.