While some folks still cry out that the sky isn’t falling – or at least it’s not their fault – Ohio State University researchers are looking at the latest in Antarctica glacier shrinkage:
A key glacier in Antarctica is breaking apart from the inside out, suggesting that the ocean is weakening ice on the edges of the continent.
The Pine Island Glacier, part of the ice shelf that bounds the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is one of two glaciers that researchers believe are most likely to undergo rapid retreat, bringing more ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the ocean, where its melting would flood coastlines around the world.
A nearly 225-square-mile iceberg broke off from the glacier in 2015, but it wasn’t until Ohio State University researchers were testing some new image-processing software that they noticed something strange in satellite images taken before the event.
In the images, they saw evidence that a rift formed at the very base of the ice shelf nearly 20 miles inland in 2013. The rift propagated upward over two years, until it broke through the ice surface and set the iceberg adrift over 12 days in late July and early August 2015.
They note this has been seen on the Greenland ice cap, and is signaled by the appearance of valleys in the ice cap. It is traced to the ocean infiltrating under the ice cap, and thus speeding the melting. The upshot?
“The really troubling thing is that there are many of these valleys further up-glacier,” [OSU Professor Ian] Howat added. “If they are actually sites of weakness that are prone to rifting, we could potentially see more accelerated ice loss in Antarctica.”
And that could result in a 10 foot jump in average sea level.
Sitting here contemplating these observations, I suddenly had a vision of Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), he of no accomplishments, twenty years in the future finally acknowledging (as the sea pours into his shoes waders in the streets of Miami) that the climate is changing – and then announcing that, despite his catastrophic failure to listen to the warnings of scientists, he would be, once again, running for the nomination of his party, with no shame, and probably still no accomplishments.
I’d say it’s a chilling vision of the future, but obviously that would contradict today’s settled science. I suppose I’ll just have to say I’m all steamed up about it.
