Science - Most Antarctic Ice Shelves Could Be Gone Within Lifetimes Of People Alive Today

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Eighteen years of change in thickness and volume of Antarctic ice shelves. Large, deep red circles correspond to the biggest melting of ice shelves, while smaller, blue ones mark those areas that gained a bit of thickness in the last two decades. Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego


According to a new study published in the journal Science this week, this could happen by the end of the century. "Within a lifetime of people who read this story, many of these shelves will be gone," said Andrew Shepherd, a polar scientist at the University of Leeds who reviewed the study before publication. "This is real, rapid environmental change. These shelves have been around for 10,000 years. It is a classic example of how drastically you can disturb the planet with small changes."

Researchers have historically focused their attention on land-based ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica because they are massive contributors to sea level rise, said Fernando Paolo, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the lead author of the new paper.

When ice shelves melt, however, they don't raise sea levels directly because they are already in the ocean. But Paolo calls them an "overlooked, yet fundamental piece in the whole sea level rise process." Monitoring them could yield clues as to when this climate impact will go from bad to worse.

The paper comes two weeks after it was revealed that a glacier the size of California in East Antarctica has experienced rapid melting in recent years. If this particular glacier, the Totten Glacier, reaches the ocean, it could cause sea level to rise more than 11 feet.

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http://insideclimatenews.org/news/26032015/antarcticas-rapidly-melting-edges-bode-ill-sea-level-rise-climate-change-global-warming

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. it could cause sea level to rise more than 11 feet

What does the U.S. look like with an ocean that is 10 feet higher? The radically transformed map would lose 28,800 square miles of land, home today to 12.3 million people.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/u.s.-with-10-feet-of-sea-level-rise-17428

[hatrack]

2. Not the shelves themselves - they're already floating . . . .

But speeded-up flow of the glaciers they're currently controlling could be a factor.