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A new study sheds light on how much ice could be lost in Antarctica if the international community could not urgently curb planetary emissions, reinforcing arguments for a more daring climate policy.
The study, published in the journal Thursday Geophysical research letters, found that more than a third of the area of all Antarctic ice sheets – including 67% of the area of the Antarctic Peninsula – could be at risk of collapsing if world temperatures reached 4 ° C above pre-industrial levels. rise.
An ice shelf, as NASA explains, ‘is a thick, floating plate of ice that forms where a glacier or ice flows down a shoreline. ‘They are only found in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada and the Russian Arctic – and play a key role in limiting sea level rise.
“Ice shelves are important buffers that prevent glaciers on land from flowing freely in the ocean and contributing to sea level,” Ella Gilbert, the study’s lead author, explained in a statement. “When it collapses, it’s like a giant cork removed from a bottle, dropping unimaginable amounts of glacial water into the ocean.”
“We know that when molten ice accumulates on the surface of ice shelves, it can break and collapse in a dazzling way,” added Gilbert, a researcher at the University of Reading. “Previous research has given us a bigger picture that predicts the Antarctic ice shelf decline, but our new study uses the latest modeling techniques to fill in the finer details and give more accurate projections.”
Gilbert and co-author Christoph Kittel of the Belgian University of Liège conclude that limiting the global temperature rise to 2 ° C instead of 4 ° C would halve the risk.
“At 1.5 ° C, only 14% of Antarctica’s ice shelf surface will be endangered,” Gilbert said. The conversation.
While the 2015 Paris Climate Accord aims to keep the temperature rise “far below” 2 ° C, with a more ambitious 1.5 ° C target, current emission reduction plans are dramatically out of step with both goals, according to a analysis of the United Nations.
Gilbert said on Thursday that the findings of their new study “emphasize the importance of limiting global temperature rises as set out in the Paris Agreement if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, including sea level rise.”
“If the temperature continues to rise at the current rate,” she said, “we could lose more Antarctic ice racks in the coming decades.”
The researchers warn that Larsen C – the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula – as well as the ice shelves Shackleton, Pine Island and Wilkins, are most at risk of warming below 4 ° C due to their geographical forecast.
“Limiting global warming will not only be good for Antarctica; maintaining ice shelves means less global sea level rise, and that’s good for all of us,” Gilbert added.
Low-lying coastal areas such as the small islands of Vanuatu and Tuvalu in the South Pacific are at greatest risk due to rising sea levels, Gilbert said. CNN.
“However, coastal areas around the world will be vulnerable,” she warned, “and countries with less available resources to soften and adjust sea levels will have worse consequences.”
Research published in February examining projections from the Fifth assessment report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the body Special report on the ocean and the cryosphere in a changing climate found that the predictions for rising sea levels for this century “are valid if tested on satellite and tidal meters.”
A co-author of the study, John Church of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, said at the time that “if we continue with large ongoing emissions as we are at present, we will commit the world to meters of sea level will rise in the coming centuries. ”
Parties to the Paris Agreement are updating their commitments to reduce emissions – called nationally determined contributions – ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Summit, known as COP26.
This article was posted by EcoWatch via ordinary dreams.
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