This icicle makes terrifying new ice loss study

we talk about ice cream a lot here on Earther – or more precisely, its growing absence. New study highlights what’s happening on the planet perspective. While i can tell you the results show that 1.2 trillion tonnes of ice has been missing every year since 1994, it is much easier to grasp as a visual.

That ice cube up there towers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) in the sky like an umbrella over Manhattan and stretches on a large strip of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. This’s how much we have lost burning fossil fuels on average per year the last two decades. The skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown are toothpicks. More worrying, the the cube grows as the ice loss accelerates.

The ice cube illustration is linked to a study published in the Cryosphere Monday looking at, uh, the state of the cryosphere. A team of scientists from the UK have used satellite measurements and climate models to explore what’s happening in every nook and cranny of ice around the world. While most studies focus on sea ice or land ice, the new article examines both to give us a better understanding of how much ice has melted due to climate change.

“There has been a huge international effort to study individual regions, such as glaciers are spreading around the planet, the polar ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans ”, Tom Slater, of the study Senior author and ice researcher at the University of Leeds, said in an email. “We felt that there was now enough data to be able to combine these efforts and examine all the lost ice on the planet.

The results show Arctic sea ice is the fastest disappearing ice on the planet. A whopping 7.6 trillion tonnes went liquid from 1994 to 2017, a period for which the study had data. This was followed by the Antarctic Ice Shelves, which saw 6.5 trillion tonnes of ice disappear, sometimes catastrophically. The most recent example is the Iceberg A68, a piece of ice the size of the Delaware snatched from the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017 and has since roamed the South and Atlantic Oceans. he the most recently had a near-break-in with an ecologically sensitive island.

But other, more insidious forms of ice floe drama are underway. The study is not just about the ice area; this too look at the volume of ice. And the most shocking impacts on the ice shelves occur below the surface. Ice shelves protrude from the ocean, retaining glaciers on land ice caps. But in West Antarctica, satellite and direct observations show hot water eats away on the ice shelves and could eventually cause them to collapse. If this happens, sea level rise will accelerate and not stop for centuries; the ice in West Antarctica could lift the sea more than 3 meters (10 feet).

Land-based glaciers in Alaska, the Himalayas and elsewhere are also the main drivers of sea level rise, just like the glaciers and ice caps of Greenland. They are all disappearing at an alarming rate. The threat of water loss in regions dependent on glaciers and snowmelt is certainly an acute concern. The same goes for the disappearance of sea ice and its impact on traditional ways of life in the Arctic. And the incremental but increasing sea level rise can play out dramatically when hurricanes roar ashore, pushing a storm surge farther indoors thanks to the surge of climate change. Perhaps most worryingly, the cast is only a small aspect of the changes that are taking place.

“We found that it only takes about 3% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions to melt all that ice, a surprisingly small amount of energy to melt so much. amount of ice, which has a disproportionate effect on our environment, ”Slater says.

From this perspective, the giant icicle of hell shows only a tiny part of the impact of human activities on the planet.