Don’t give up, scientists say, the world can still avoid doom from melting Antarctic ice | 24CA News
When Britney Schmidt piloted a robotic down a slim bore gap to discover the underbelly of the world’s widest glacier, she was amazed by what she noticed — ice pockmarked by crevasses and staircase-like patterns.
“I never thought of being able to use my eyes to detect melting,” mentioned Schmidt, an affiliate professor at Cornell University in New York who led the group that constructed and deployed the autonomous undersea robotic named IceFin.
In January 2020, Schmidt and her group journeyed to the continent of snow and ice, together with a world expedition of scientists from the United States and Britain. She mentioned they met their fair proportion of obstacles; doing subject work in Antarctica concerned ready out a storm in a tent and digging out of two-metre tall snow drifts.
“It is just the most powerfully beautiful place in the world. It is so impressive and so dangerous, and at the same time so fragile,” Schmidt mentioned.
Her findings, revealed this month within the analysis journal Nature, reveal how warming ocean waters are eroding glaciers within the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Every fraction of a level of enhance in world temperature averages has penalties, which is why Schmidt and her colleagues are hoping their analysis will assist extra precisely predict the hyperlink between local weather change, receding ice and rising sea ranges.
“For the next 100 years, we’re still going to be strongly affected by what’s already happened,” Schmidt mentioned.
“Do we need a five-foot seawall or a 10-foot seawall, or do we need to move people out of coastal environments in places that are particularly susceptible? What else can we do as humans to make our planet livable for us?” Schmidt mentioned.
The focus of her analysis: the colossal Thwaites Glacier, which at 192,000 sq. kilometres is bigger than New Brunswick and Nova Scotia mixed.
Don’t name it the Doomsday Glacier
Already, the receding glacier is contributing about 4 per cent of all world sea stage rise.
Peter Davis, a bodily oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey, mentioned the ice shelf that sits off the entrance of Thwaites acts like a cork, holding the glacier again.
But it has been disintegrating.
“Over the next 10 to 20 years, we’d probably expect that kind of safety band to disintegrate entirely,” he mentioned.
If the glacier had been to break down fully, which scientists anticipate will take centuries, the glacier may add greater than half a metre of worldwide sea rise potential, whereas additionally destabilizing neighbouring glaciers.
That’s why some have dubbed it the “Doomsday” glacier.
But not Davis.
“As scientists, we try to avoid the use of the term ‘Doomsday glacier’ because it tends to suggest that there’s nothing left for us to do,” Davis mentioned.
“That’s definitely not the case.”
He mentioned the take away should not be local weather dread and hopelessness — however extra knowledgeable local weather change mitigation and adaptation methods.
“It’s not too late. We can mitigate the worst effects and we can do good.”
Davis, who was part of the identical worldwide expedition to Thwaites Glacier in 2020, present in his analysis that whereas the melting fee was decrease than anticipated, it does not take a lot of a change to push a giant Antarctic glacier out of equilibrium.
“We want to go ahead from this point with all the information we’re gathering and use it to justify ways to cut our carbon emissions and to move to a greener economy,” he mentioned.
Schmidt agreed, saying it is essential to recollect the alternatives that individuals make proper now can have an effect on folks dwelling on the opposite facet of the world.
“This idea — that because you own a piece of land somewhere, you only have to take care of that piece — It just doesn’t really work like that. We’re in a complex integrated system,” she mentioned.
Canada weak to rising sea ranges
In truth, Canadian local weather researcher William Colgan mentioned Canada truly receives a disproportionate quantity of its sea stage rise from Antarctica.
“It’s the classic case of what happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica,” he mentioned.
When Antarctic ice melts into water, the continent within the southern hemisphere loses mass, Colgan defined. That means gravity round Antarctica decreases and the water flows towards the northern hemisphere.
Colgan, who works with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, mentioned he thinks Canada ought to contemplate being extra concerned in Antarctic analysis.
“Canada’s not a signatory to the Antarctic Treaty system, so we don’t have a physical presence down there,” he mentioned.
“I think generally climate change is the overriding narrative that’s going to shape our society over the next 50 to 100 years. And the more involved a nation is in that research, the better its understanding.”
WATCH | Investigating melting glaciers and rising sea ranges:
An worldwide group of researchers piloted an underwater robotic to research the extent of soften skilled by the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica.
