Massive Ice Shelf Collapses in Antarctica (thehill.com) 107
"A massive ice shelf in eastern Antartica collapsed, scientists said on Friday, marking the first time an ice shelf has done so in the region," reports the Hill:
The 460-square mile wide ice shelf, which was roughly the size of New York City and helped keep the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and March 16, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute ice scientist Catherine Walker told The Associated Press. University of Minnesota ice scientist Peter Neff said the collapse was worrying because eastern Antartica holds five times more ice than western Antartica, and if the whole region were to melt, it could raise sea levels across the globe more than 160 feet, according to the AP.
Scientists had long thought that the area had not been impacted heavily by climate change and was stable, according to the wire service, but Neff said the collapse of the ice shelf brought that belief into question. The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf has been shrinking since the 1970s, Neff noted. Walker added that it rapidly began losing ice in 2020, according to the AP.
"The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years, and it's not ever going to be there again," Neff told the wire service.
Last week the Washington Post reported that temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet had been "soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal."
Scientists had long thought that the area had not been impacted heavily by climate change and was stable, according to the wire service, but Neff said the collapse of the ice shelf brought that belief into question. The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf has been shrinking since the 1970s, Neff noted. Walker added that it rapidly began losing ice in 2020, according to the AP.
"The Glenzer-Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years, and it's not ever going to be there again," Neff told the wire service.
Last week the Washington Post reported that temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet had been "soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal."
Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
I'm eagerly waiting to see what kind of things the conspiracy theorists will come up with and post in this thread.
It'll be fun!
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
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I know people, smart people, who are retiring to FL and buying homes. I told them that eventually these homes will be worthless. And your kids will never see any of the money you spend on them. What they said, "who cares about them". This is quite a few people, and no one I know thinks of helping out their kids (except, believe it or not, for my Sister and her Husband).
No wonder the world racing towards a climate catastrophe. No one seems to even care about their own children. Me, every big purchase I
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Helping your heirs but not the rest of humanity is at least somewhat selfish, too. But yeah, I'm doing a lot to set my kids up for a better life than they'll probably have without my help.
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
Miami isn't going away.
Long before today's small buildings in Miami end up permanently submerged, they'll get destroyed by a hurricane & be replaced by a new building that's bigger & more expensive, sitting on an additional few feet of trucked-in fill dirt after bulldozing the previous one away.
Skyscrapers will just gut the first floor, turn it into a de-facto basement, backfill dirt around it, and the second floor will become the new first floor.
Roads here get rebuilt every 25-50 years anyway... if
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Sink hole problem. Florida rests upon a lot of limestone which salt water EATS so the surface groundwater becoming salty is a much larger problem than most people realize.
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
Sinkholes are a CENTRAL Florida phenomenon.
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
Google: Lake Okeechobee
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...
250 years from now, Miami's coastline might look like a concrete cliff towering over a beach that gets rebuilt every November, but there will most certainly BE a vast, expensive city covering every inch of land that's allowed to be developed.
That's more concrete than has ever been poured by man. And you think the Taxpayers are going to foot the bill?
Not hardly
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
It wouldn't be solid concrete. It would be retained-earth, like the side of a modern highway. Only the outer shell would be concrete.
The "filling" would be crushed limestone gravel, which South Florida has absolutely no shortage of. Vast amounts could be obtained right from Biscayne Bay itself, and by digging an underwater canyon with draglines a few hundred feet offshore.
Really, it's no different than how 80% of Miami's land area, and 97% of Miami Beach, was created in the first place. South Florida hasn't
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Because those property owners will get the government to subsidize the cost of building levees to keep the ocean out. If that doesn't work, FEMA will act as flood insurance. Either way, nobody's stopping them so there's no reason for them not to build.
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I remember Rush Limbaugh assuring us that sea level rise from Antarctica melting was totally a fake issue. Because when a cube of ice in glass of water melts the water level doesn't rise.
It is hard to imagine people that people can become more stupid after watching a science demonstration, but that was a good demonstration of that.
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I'm pretty sure Rush Limbaugh was talking about Arctic, because that sea ice is floating on the sea. He was correct of course, but forgot to mention that Greenland and Antarctica melting won't give as happy results.
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Not even true for them, because warmer water takes up more space per molecule (above about 39F). Most of the rise in the ocean levels so far (well as of a few years ago) was due to the expansion of water.
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I'm pretty sure Rush Limbaugh was talking about Arctic, because that sea ice is floating on the sea.
Greenland is in the Arctic. It's not sea. Ditto lots of other bits of the Arctic.
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Rush Limbaugh fans don't know the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic
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Antarctica has two gigantic ice masses:
a) the ice on the continent, afaik a 4km high ice. mountain
b) ice floating on the water around it: called "shelf ice"
If b) melts, it is like an ice cube in a drink - the melting levels out.
If a) melts, or drops into the water: sea level will rise
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Because when a cube of ice in glass of water melts the water level doesn't rise.
Antarctica is a continent, a large landmass, not a cube of ice. The Arctic is a cube of ice. Arctic ice melting has no effect on sea level. Antarctic ice melting does.
It is hard to imagine people that people can become more stupid after watching a science demonstration
And yet here we are, someone who failed basic geography at school thinks that the science demonstration is relevant to the discussion at hand. Clear evidence that yes, stupid people are everywhere.
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I'm eagerly waiting to see what kind of things the conspiracy theorists will come up with and post in this thread.
It'll be fun!
Doesn't seem like snarking is working ... guess we need to find some technological solutions, like CO2 scrubbing on a mass scale.
Oh, and go nuclear.
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
Sure, my conspiracy theory about it:
The ideological struggle behind WWII never ended. Specifically, the group of people who were back then called eugenicists, believe in a gardened or engineered world. The group representing allies believed in a laissez-faire approach.
The claims of the former were that capitalism would lead to depletion of resources and death on scales never seen. After WWII they worked only on hiding, survival and advanced technology, and facilitating the demise.
After catastrophic climate
Someone please upmod the parent as insightful? (Score:2)
He only forgot to mention that the United States has been an Industrial-Military complex since the close of the last world war. Personally, I'm wondering how we're not making a fortune off Putin's genocide in Ukraine? After all, we are Minos, the Arsenal of Freedom.
But I digress. On behalf of scientists everywhere, then, I should like to apologize for
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It's because Biden is weak. Trump would have held up the ice sheet!
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I think I heard someone said that Putin was seen with a hair dryer over there just before that ice shelf collapsed.
On a more serious note, I think 160 feet higher sea level will flood most of the land. Earth may become an island planet, with a few small island surrounded by a huge ocean.
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University of Minnesota ice scientist Peter Neff said the collapse was worrying because eastern Antartica holds five times more ice than western Antartica, and if the whole region were to melt, it could raise sea levels across the globe more than 160 feet, according to the AP.
I'd like to see the math behind this statement, that seems a bit fantastical - and a timeframe would be nice too.
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"Polar Ice" is kind of a meaningless word in this case, since it matters just a tiny bit whether that's North or South pole.
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https://www.politifact.com/fac... [politifact.com]
Lol. What's the logical fallacy where you set up a strawman appeal to authority, except you just made the whole thing up?
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"Art."
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"Vandelay".
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Well, OK, as long as you consider a Campbell's Soup can signed by Andy Warhol art. It may be art, but it's not very good art.
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Bravo sir or madam.
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if just this one shelf has collapsed 9 years on.
Fortunately in the last 9 years only one AC has posted something stupid on Slashdot! See I too can selectively view the world ignoring anything that doesn't suit what I want to say.
Dumbarse. Read some Slashdot, you may find more than one ice shelf has collapsed, and this isn't even a site which typically runs those stories.
I do agree with you on one thing. I too would be waaaay to ashamed to write what you wrote to put my username behind it.
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Ironically downvoted for giving a perfectly reasonable answer to the question of "what kind of things the conspiracy theorists will come up with".
It is widely acknowledged by climate experts that models are imperfect [realclimate.org], though of course there are some who greatly exaggerate this [youtube.com]
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nuclear-wary outlets will publish hundreds of articles about Fukushima (which has caused maybe one fatal cancer)
It did, however, require 160,000 people to abandon their homes. An area of more than 13,000 square km was closed to all human activity. More than a decade later, more than 300 square km is still closed off [fukushima.lg.jp] and more than 30,000 people have never been able to return.
Be careful of your own confirmation bias. You're focusing on the data points that support your view while ignoring the ones that contradict it.
(Yes, I'm just nitpicking a minor detail. What you said about climate science was all accurate. Sin
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I agree about most of view but I think with respect to nuclear you fell into the trap of falling into your own selection biases.
Clearly dam failures can be catastrophic, but the main problem here is that those dams are build for a variety or reasons and electricity generation is just one of them. Often flood control is an important goal of such dams. It is there for a bit misleading to cite those numbers in the context of safety of electricity generation.
One can also question the numbers of nuclear power.
Re: Conspiracy Theorists Unite! (Score:2)
You ARE referring to the same country full of MENSA members who, when global warming started being discussed...
CREATED BEER COMMERCIALS CELEBRATING THE COMING RESULTS. These were complete with swimsuit clad twits saying "Bring on the party!".
It will not be another country, or aliens, or really even disease that wipes is out. We happily put the pistol to our own head cheering about how awesome this is as we pull the trigger.
I hope they all drown, call it "Darwin's Gene-pool Chlorine."
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This was predicted. Not the date and time and location, but certainly we know that the ice shelves are melting and shrinking.
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Between the best and worst case scenarios are the varying probabilities.
The catastrophe has proved the Climatologists were guilty of OPTIMISM and nothing else.
So, they were right, and your petrochemical denialists are wrong...again.
Is this the cataclysmic event horizon? (Score:2)
Barrier ice shelf and protector of the whole of eastern Antarctica is intimated lost.
What exactly besides 50 to 90F above normal needs to occur to trigger the eastern Antarctic sheet melt? Sea rise 160 feet sounds millennial
Re: Is this the cataclysmic event horizon? (Score:2)
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When Antarctica melts as a whole it is > 160 meters!
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IIUC, we're already into the next ice age. But the elevation of CO2 has prevented it from happening. We've just gone a bit overboard.
millennial sounds about right (Score:2)
I.e., I wouldn't be surprise if following the trend to completion took 1,000 years if we stopped adding to the problem.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH (Score:1)
160 feet (Score:2)
That's a lot of feet.
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It's risen 200 meters in the past 1000 years. Many Roman cities are two miles out under water.
The crazies are actually the ones who think the sea won't rise and that we can stop it.
But, hey, tax the poor into poverty to try in vein to protect the malinvestments of the wealthy elite.
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10,000 . GDI.
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It's risen 200 meters in the past 1000 years. Many Roman cities are two miles out under water.
That is double wrong. (Triple actually)
1) it is "Has risen"
2) it is roughly 200 meters over the last 10,000 - 12,000 years
3) if a roman city is under water: it is due to an earthquake and not sea level rise
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That's absurd. There many port cities in Europe that have been in the same place for more than 1000 years, but mysteriously aren't under water. You're making up nonsense.
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They did have meters 1000 years ago. Can you state this in hands or rods?
Re: 160 feet (Score:2)
Yeah, that's why Castel Dell'Oro in Naples, founded on a small island in the 6th Century BCE, where Romulus Augustulus was exiled in 476 CE, is now completely underwater.
Only it isn't.
Your claims are equal part ignorance and a pig headed determination to ignore what is in plain sight.
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This is what happens when climate activists simply accept without challenge anything and everything their "leaders" say, never asking "does that seem plausible", or "is this consistent with what they said before"?
There's a similar phenomenon in homelessness and hunger. Once upon a time homelessness was easy to identify, now it has been redefined to include anyone living paycheck to paycheck ( we include people who might become homeless in the future, because the actual homeless numbers aren't big enough, ap
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Climate change is real.
Climate change is not caused by human environmental pollution - but it is being impacted by it. Possibly only fractionally, possibly by orders of magnitude.
We can either do nothing about it (the religious, alt-right viewpoint), or we can panic and run around screaming like Chicken Little (the reactionary, alt-left viewpoint). OR we could do something phenomenally insane like putting aside the extremist arguments and figuring o
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It's risen 200 meters in the past 1000 years. Many Roman cities are two miles out under water.
Citation please? Every coastal city from the year 1,000 is now 200 meters under water? That assertion can't simply go unchallenged.
Oh, is THAT what happened to Pompeii? (Score:2)
Humans are irrational and gullible (Score:2)
We are an engineering problem away from limitless safe clean energy, but corrupt and fearful governments protecting fossil fuel stops any real progress.
Geothermal, fusion, fission or even wind and solar are all viable options.
But no, let's just stick our heads in the sand and watch our beautiful planet and its exquisit
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Geothermal is only viable in a very few places. Even in those it's a bit marginal. We can't to fusion yet, except in bombs (or on a REALLY small scale). Fission plants are horrendously complicated. We have technical solutions, but not managerial solutions. (I'm hoping some of the newer designs get away from that. Molten Salt reactors have a lot of promise, but need to prove out.) Solar and wind are viable, but require "rare earth" elements, which we have allowed to be monopolized by China on economi
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Those sound like engineering problems....
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They are either engineering or management problems. Occasionally a combination. This doesn't keep them from being real problems. Many of them obviously have solutions, but then we get into politics.
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That's probably why the post you replied to said there are engineering problems.
Geothermal tech (Score:2)
Geothermal hasn't had the engineering put into it that Oil drilling has. Put in research and engineering and you can expand the drilling.
Geothermal techniques where fracking like approaches are taken end up with contaminated water like fracking creates - except we are just now starting to look at uses for this dirty toxic water. Turns out that lithium can be profitably extracted in significant amounts. More elements are likely possible too. Besides energy, it might be possible it generates more money as
Re: Humans are irrational and gullible (Score:2)
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I, personally, don't rate that "deep drilling for geothermal power" as likely to succeed. Some of the other look as if they could work, but they require development that hasn't happened, so they might not. There isn't a single "small fission reactor" that I consider a certainty. (You need to include being safe in the presence of cost-cutting management.)
And I suspect you really don't understand the problems with fusion unless you're thinking about exploding a bomb in an underground location and using the
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We are an engineering problem away from limitless safe clean energy, but corrupt and fearful governments protecting fossil fuel stops any real progress.
Geothermal, fusion, fission or even wind and solar are all viable options.
But no, let's just stick our heads in the sand and watch our beautiful planet and its exquisite ecosystems die
The lat few few multi-trillion dollar bills passed by the US government have collectively included about a trillion dollars in purported green/alternative energy programs - I don't recall any new subsidies or handouts to "big oil" in any of those bills, but the US is only one country, and this is over just a handful of years, but I can't remember the last time the US government proposed a new subsidy for "big oil" - can you cite any?
Big Oil generates a HUGE amount of tax revenue that are supposed to fund ro
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https://e360.yale.edu/digest/f... [yale.edu]
And that is before the health and environmental costs that are born by taxpayers. Please try to get the truth instead of consuming propaganda.
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We need to stop thinking we can cheat against nature (by saying we'll worry about cleaning up the mess after we get the energy we "need"), and instead work with nature (by admitting that everything we do has a price and try
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Unfortunately we need fossil fuel for the foreseeable future, but we also need to drive hard for viable alternatives. The free market is already doing this, but not fast enough.
East Antarctica? (Score:1)
For a roughly round continent that covers the south pole, where is East? Surely is one of the north ones.
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IIUC, it's the part near New Zealand. Or perhaps India. Not the part near Peru or Africa, anyway, that's West Antarctica.
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Greenwich Meridian goes through Antarctica as well.
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Simple explanation:
Look on a map. East is right side, West is left side.
Complex explanation: left as an exercise to the reader. Perhaps you might look carefully how the meridians are numbered on the west side and how they are numbered on the east side.
No idea why stupid nitpickers are so stupid that they not think first when they think they found a fault (in others).
It looked straight to me when it went up, darling. (Score:1)
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While that is true, an ice SHELF does not sit on land, and is supported by the sea below. It's not exactly floating, but it's not on land either.
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You don't understand because you never finished kindergarten.
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Most ice in Antarctica and Greenland is on land. When it melts the water won't stay on land. There you go, now you understand.
For the rest of the world... (Score:2)
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Really? Never happened before? Never?
Wasn't there a time when the entire planet was covered with ice, and most of it melted? Are we really sure that at the end of that ice age no ice shelf's collapsed, or does "history" only extend back to the days of the first weather satellites?
EasternAntarctica? (Score:2)
Where is the east coast of Antarctica?
More lies (Score:1)
Not the first time and they know it. The larsen shelf fell about two decades ago - https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/r... [nasa.gov]
So this is natural. It happens from time to time and they know it. Just the latest round of fake man made global warming claims.
Why do I say fake? Glad you asked. Do you know the scientific method? The one where if you have one counter example to a theory it proves the theory is wrong (as Einstein famously said)? It's a proven verifiable fact that the 1930s is the hottest decade of the 1900s.
I said NEAT, not on the rocks! (Score:1)
Can't blame Putin (Score:1)
See, the conservatives do care about the environment.