The American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting is a week away, I’ll be going to San Francisco to observe and participate where possible. I’m reposting the above interview, one of my favorites from last year, with Dr. Eric Rignot, the ice expert’s ice expert.
Dr. Rignot,discussed ice balance and the impact of IMBIE – the recently published Ice Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise which brought together divergent data sets on ice sheet dynamics. Takeaway – yup, it’s pretty much all melting like we thought.
I originally posted the clip with the news item below. Both the clip and the news item are relevant to some discussion that has recently occurred in the comment threads.
OSLO, Dec 23 (Reuters) – West Antarctica is warming almost twice as fast as previously believed, adding to worries of a thaw that would add to sea level rise from San Francisco to Shanghai, a study showed on Sunday.
Annual average temperatures at the Byrd research station in West Antarctica had risen 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3F) since the 1950s, one of the fastest gains on the planet and three times the global average in a changing climate, it said.
The unexpectedly big increase adds to fears the ice sheet is vulnerable to thawing. West Antarctica holds enough ice to raise world sea levels by at least 3.3 metres (11 feet) if it ever all melted, a process that would take centuries.
“The western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought,” Ohio State University said in a statement of the study led by its geography professor David Bromwich.
The warming “raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise,” it said. Higher summer temperatures raised risks of a surface melt of ice and snow even though most of Antarctica is in a year-round deep freeze.
The worrying part is that we do not need big numbers of sea level rise. One meter would be devastating to the World economy and with relatively small contributions from so many parts of the cryosphere this could happen quite quickly. East Antarctica may be relatively stable but West Antarctica is melting from the bottom with warm sea water, Greenland is becoming unstable and most of the land glaciers are in retreat. The combination of all of them could give the one meter that would do so much damage.
look for new video on this very soon
Excellent, and especially thanks for the IMBIE stuff.
Great that you were able to get an interview with Rignot, one of the top ice experts. It kind of makes sense that Anatarctic is more slow to respond to GW. Its ice mass is continental, and much at high altitudes. Also, there is no nearby permafrost methane source. We still have to watch carefully, because we have lost a lot of ice shelves, which leads to higher glacier calving. For now, Greenland looks like a much bigger worry.
Greenland is getting renewed focus, but Alley’s lecture “Slip Slidin Away” discusses the concerns about Antarctica.
New video on this out tomorrow.