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Florida-sized glacier melting much faster than expected and may soon cause sea level rise of 50 cm, according to a new NASA-funded study published online by the National Academy of Sciences report science.
The study found that over the past six years, several closely observed Antarctic glaciers have doubled their melting rate. Their melting rate was five times faster than in the 1990s. The Thwaites Glacier, one of five unstable glaciers recently studied, covering an area of ​​approximately 70,000 square miles, is likely to quickly melt into ocean, which will lead to an inevitable rise in sea level.
The mathematical models created by the researchers establish the most catastrophic scenarios of rapid melting and rapid rise in sea-water level, far more likely than the optimal scenarios of slowly increasing level of sea-level It is impossible to predict the amount of ice that glaciers will lose over the next 50 to 800 years as the climate changes constantly and more data is needed. And yet, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA's Reaction Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Washington, have taken into account the instability in 500 Thwaites ice flow simulations, with precise calculations, according to Phys.org.
Although the scenarios showed a wide range of possibilities, they consistently pointed to irreversible instability in the glacier that would continue to push the sea ice at an extremely accelerated rate over the next centuries.
A total loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is expected to increase sea levels by about five meters (16 feet), which would overwhelm coastal cities around the world. In some models, the entire icecap could disappear within 150 years, even if global temperatures cease to increase, which they show no sign of doing, according to the Guardian.
"If you trigger this instability, you do not need to keep forcing the ice layer by raising the temperature.It will continue to work on its own, and that's the concern," he said. Alex Robel, assistant professor at Georgia Tech. lead author, as reported by the Independent. "Climatic variations will always be important after this tipping point, as they will determine the speed at which the ice will move."
This study follows another study published in the same journal that focused on satellite images of the continent and revealed a band of ice four times larger than France has melted since 2014, as reported by EcoWatch.
Antarctica is a heavy weight of ice. It contains nearly eight times more land ice than the Greenland icecap and 50 times more than any mountain glacier in the world. According to the Guardian, the Thwaites Glacier contains enough ice to raise sea level to about 50 cm, or more than 19.6 inches, which is alarming because sea level rise due to global warming is already linked to the increase in coastal floods and storm surges.
The current sea level is already 8 inches above the pre-industrial level and the annual rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1990.
"You want to put in place a critical infrastructure to withstand the upper limit of potential sea-level scenarios in a hundred years," said Robel, quoted in The Independent newspaper. "This can mean building your water treatment plants and your nuclear reactors in the worst case, which could be a sea-level rise of only two to three feet from the Thwaites Glacier, which is the only way to do so. so is a huge difference. "
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