It is such a silly thing. This climate crisis. it is all happening because we are losing our ice structures to warming oceans. Why is everyone trying to make this complicated. The actual physics is complicated, but, understanding what is causing this crisis is about water, frozen water in the way of glaciers and ice fields. They are different than the ice in anyone's freezer for cooling drinks. These are big icecubes that only planet Earth can produce. The greenhouse gases have to be viewed as an existential threat to human life. No one can get their minds around the fact that big ice fields, glaciers, and ice caps are important for mitigating heat on Earth. They are our reserves. We are losing the fight.
Antarctica and Greenland are the biggest contributors to sea-level rise. They are land-based ice and when it melts they increase the volume of the ocean. The Arctic Ocean is already down to less than 1-year-old ice and it's contribution has been significant, but, nothing like land-based ice.
April 9, 2021
By Carolyn GramlingThe under-ice trek of an autonomous underwater vehicle (click here) is giving scientists their first direct evidence for how and where warm ocean waters are threatening the stability of Antarctica’s vulnerable Thwaites Glacier. These new data will ultimately help scientists more accurately project the fate of the glacier — how quickly it is melting and retreating inland, and how far it might be from complete collapse, the team reports April 9 in Science Advances.
“We know there’s a sick patient out there, and it’s not able to tell us where it hurts,” says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the new study. “So this is the first diagnosis.”
Scientists have eyed the Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier with mounting concern for two decades. Satellite images reveal it has been retreating at an alarming rate of somewhere between 0.6 to 0.8 kilometers per year on average since 2001, prompting some to dub it the “doomsday glacier.” But estimates of how quickly the glacier is retreating, based on computer simulations, vary widely from place to place on the glacier, Rignot and other researchers reported in Science Advances in 2019. Such uncertainty is the biggest difficulty when it comes to future projections of sea level rise (SN: 1/7/20).
The primary culprit for the rapid retreat of Thwaites and other Antarctic glaciers is known: Relatively warm ocean waters sneak beneath the floating ice shelves, the fringes of the glaciers that jut out into the ocean (SN: 9/9/20). This water eats away at the ice shelves’ underpinnings, points where the ice is anchored to the seafloor that buttress the rest of the glacier against sliding into the sea....
