Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapses

 

Relax, it's not the Thwaites ice sheet. You might have to wait a few years for that one.

It's the Conger ice sheet, at 1,200 sq. kms. a good deal smaller.

The science types suspect the recent Antarctic heat dome that saw temperatures reach an incredible 40 degrees Celsius above normal might have helped the Conger to break loose.


Dr Catherine Colello Walker, an earth and planetary scientist at Nasa and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said though the Conger ice shelf was relatively small, “it is one of the most significant collapse events anywhere in Antarctica since the early 2000s when the Larsen B ice shelf disintegrated”.

“It won’t have huge effects, most likely, but it’s a sign of what might be coming,” Walker said.

The Conger ice shelf had been shrinking since the mid-2000s, but only gradually until the beginning of 2020, Walker said. By 4 March this year, the ice shelf appeared to have lost more than half its surface area compared to January measurements of around 1,200 sq km.

Peter Neff, a glaciologist and assistant research professor at the University of Minnesota, said that to see even a small ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica was a surprise.

Comments

  1. TrailblazerMarch 25, 2022 at 5:26 PM

    We are at the frog in the saucepan mode.
    Whilst rightfully engaging the Russian aggression in the Ukraine our politicians are playing their get out of jail cards to condone, promote or subjugate themselves to the worlds carbon monopoly!

    Again, this will not end well..

    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibMarch 26, 2022 at 12:28 PM

      I expect you're right, TB. Very few leaders in the West today can handle more than one emergency at a time. Whichever burns the brightest attracts the moth. They flit from one to another and rarely make much progress on anything.

      Delete
  2. Northern PoVMarch 26, 2022 at 8:54 AM

    Beaches.
    Like many of us, I love big sandy beaches in my home of Vancouver and in the tropics.
    We are going to miss them.

    And all our focus has been on the melting western Antarctic.
    If the east side is melting this fast ......

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibMarch 26, 2022 at 12:30 PM

      It seems sea level rise will reshape our shorelines, probably right after we spend fortunes on temporary fixes that won't hold up.

      Delete
  3. Owen GrayMarch 26, 2022 at 10:50 AM

    The signs continue. But who's paying attention?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibMarch 26, 2022 at 12:32 PM

      I think we've become a society that can see problems but expects some father figure to step in and kiss our boo-boo.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Navigating the Minefield of Short-Termism

Image
Its disappearance went largely unnoticed. There was no post mortem, no eulogy, no deep sighs for what had been lost. Posterity slipped from our consciousness as we ushered in the neoliberal era 40 years ago. Populations would now be administered, not led. Grand vision was a quaint artifact of generations past. Besides, the invisible hand of the marketplace would see to all our needs today, tomorrow, forever. Politicians grew smaller and smaller until they shrunk to fit the mold of technocracy.  Like sheep being dipped we were plunged into a world of supply-side economics in which lower taxation and deregulation would deliver manna from heaven. We focused on skinning the economy, and society, right to the bone. Everything would be maximized, nothing would be wasted, not even the offal.  We were surrendered to a world of short-termism. We elected governments of technocrats - grey suits stuffed with wet cardboard - whose horizons were measured in electoral cycles. They would do what they
Read more

The Gun We Point at Our Own Heads

Image
  If you're sitting at a table and there's a loaded pistol in front of you, do you pick it up and point it at your own head?  Probably not, unless something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. How would you feel if someone else was holding that pistol to your head? But there is a pistol pointed at our heads and, unless we do something about it, we're goners. It's not a Glock. It's fossil fuels and the industry is slowly squeezing the trigger. Proven fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to generate 3.5 trillion tons of greenhouse gas emissions .  Russia and the United States each have massive reserves of fossil energy sufficient to push humanity through the 1.5C heating limit, sometimes called the "carbon budget."  I have it on reliable authority that Washington and the Kremlin aren't getting along very well these days. After all, if you won't hold the line on nuclear proliferation, you might not be inclined to voluntarily give up a major source of na
Read more

The Cognoscenti Syndrome

  There is a group of people I think of as the Cognoscenti, people who are well educated, very informed and of rapidly diminishing relevance. Their ranks include writers such as Chris Hedges and Glen Greenwald. These are people who have honed an almost Puritanical value system, readily finding fault in any direction. They are scathing in their attacks on Republicans and Democrats alike to the point where they become nihilists. They don't endorse. They prescribe. This is where they fail. They're unable to advocate for anything that might resonate with the public whose interests they argue are being trammeled. Donald Trump was bad but Joe Biden is scarcely better. This is where their elitism comes in.  74 million may have voted for Trump but, hey, they didn't know any better. The mob that stormed the Capitol. They were just victims of the system venting their frustrations. All the racism, bigotry, xenophobia, misogyny, white nationalism - inevitable side effects of their oppr
Read more