We talk about ice cream much here on earth – or more specifically, its growing absence. A new study sets out what is happening to the planet perspective. WWhile I can tell you that the results show that 1.2 billion tons of ice has disappeared every year since 1994, it is much easier to understand it than visually.
That cube of ice is towering over there 10 kilometers (10 kilometers) into the sky like a sunshade over Manhattan and stretches over much of New Jersey, from Newark Airport to Jersey City. That’s how much we burned on average per year on the burning of fossil fuels the last two decades. The skyscrapers of the Financial District and Midtown are toothpicks. More ominous is the cube becomes larger as ice loss accelerates.
The ice cube illustration is linked to a study published in the Cryosphere Monday looking at the state of the cryosphere. A team of scientists from across the UK have used satellite measurements and climate models to investigate what is happening to every nook and cranny around the world. While most studies focus on sea ice or on land ice, the new article looks at both to give us a better understanding of how much ice has melted as a result of climate change.
‘There has been a great international effort to study individual regions, as glaciers spread across the planet, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves that float around Antarctica, and sea ice float in the Arctic and Southern oceans, “said Tom Slater, the study’s lead 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 ice that is lost from the planet. ”
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The results show Arctic sea ice is the fastest disappearing ice on the planet. A surprising 7.6 trillion tons turned into liquid from 1994 to 2017, the period for which the study had data. This was followed by Antarctic ice racks, which saw 6.5 billion tons of ice disappear, sometimes catastrophically. The most recent example is Iceberg A68, a piece of ice from Delaware ripped off the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017 and has since wandered in the Southern and Atlantic Oceans. It recently had an almost run-in with an ecologically sensitive island.
But other, more treacherous forms of ice-cream drama are underway. The study does not just look at ice area; It also has look at ice volume. And the most shocking impact on ice racks happens below the surface. Ice shelves protrude across the ocean and hold back glaciers on ice sheets on land. But in West Antarctica, satellite and direct observations show hot water ate it away at ice racks and eventually they can collapse. If this happens, sea levels will rise and not stop for centuries; the ice in West Antarctica can raise the sea by more than 3 meters.
Glaciers on land in Alaska, the Himalayas and elsewhere are also the biggest drivers for sea level, just like the glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland. They all disappear at an alarming rate. The danger of water loss in regions that depend on glaciers and snowmelt has been decided an acute concern. So too is the disappearance of sea ice and its impact on traditional ways of life in the Arctic. And increasing, but faster, sea level rise could take place dramatically when hurricanes roar ashore and push storm surgesmore inland thanks to the climate change-driven boost. Perhaps ominously, the melt is only a small aspect of the changes that are taking place.
‘We found that it took only about 3% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gas emissions to melt all this ice, a surprisingly small amount of energy to melt such a large amount of ice, which’ has an excessive impact on our environment. Said Slater.
In the light, the giant ice cube from hell shows only a small portion of the impact of human activity on the planet.