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Antarctic Researchers Say a Marine Heatwave Could Threaten Ice Shelves (arstechnica.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the warming-waters dept.
An anonymous reader shares an article that originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It was republished with permission via Ars Technica. Here's an excerpt: Research scientists on ships along Antarctica's west coast said their recent voyages have been marked by an eerily warm ocean and record-low sea ice coverage -- extreme climate conditions, even compared to the big changes of recent decades, when the region warmed much faster than the global average. Despite "that extraordinary change, what we've seen this year is dramatic," said University of Delaware oceanographer Carlos Moffat last week from Punta Arenas, Chile, after completing a research cruise aboard the RV Laurence M. Gould to collect data on penguin feeding, as well as on ice and oceans as chief scientist for the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research program. "Even as somebody who's been looking at these changing systems for a few decades, I was taken aback by what I saw, by the degree of warming that I saw," he said. "We don't know how long this is going to last. We don't fully understand the consequences of this kind of event, but this looks like an extraordinary marine heatwave."

If such conditions recur in the coming years, it could start a rapid destabilization of Antarctica's critical underpinnings of the global climate system, including ice shelves, glaciers, coastal ecosystems, and even ocean currents. Such radical changes have already been sweeping the Arctic, starting in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s. Data collected during Moffat's most recent research voyage includes the first readings from temperature and salinity sensors that were deployed a few years ago, which will give the scientists a starting point for comparisons. Moffat said it's "too early, and difficult" to attribute this year's conditions to long-term climate change until some peer-reviewed results are published. "But it seems to me that this might be a really unprecedented event," he said. "These episodes of relatively rapid ocean warming that can persist for months have been occurring all over the place. They haven't been common in this region."

He said ocean temperature readings going back to April 2022 speak to the persistence of the warm conditions off the Antarctic Peninsula. The cruise covered an area more than 600 miles long and crisscrossed waters above the 125-mile wide continental shelf, documenting widespread ocean heating. "That's a very significant region," he said. "We don't have data going back 30 years for the entire region. But for the parts of the shelf for which we do have that data, it really seems extraordinary. It's very difficult to warm the ocean, and so when we see these conditions, that really speaks to a very intense forcing."
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Antarctic Researchers Say a Marine Heatwave Could Threaten Ice Shelves

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  • I think everyone who thinks/believes that global heating isn't true should move to low-lying coastal towns & cities. You know, to prove a point.

    • I think everyone who thinks/believes that global heating isn't true should move to low-lying coastal towns & cities. You know, to prove a point.

      Miami would be a good place for them. https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]

  • It seems people need to pick their poison. Global warming or energy from nuclear fission. I can hear it now, "But, but, what about Chernobyl?" What about it? We could have 1000 Chernobyl level events, each killing 1000 people, leaving huge tracts of land as radioactive wastelands, and still come out ahead on the billions of people dead and displaced from rising seas caused by CO2 induced global warming. Why should anyone fear nuclear power when the alternative is global warming? Then comes this, "But,

    • https://www.commondreams.org/n... [commondreams.org]
      Renewable energy will become the world's number one electricity source by 2025 thanks largely to a surge in wind and solar, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday

      • I'll quote from your link, I put in bold an important detail...

        "The world's growing demand for electricity is set to accelerate, adding more than double Japan's current electricity consumption over the next three years," IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement. "The good news is that renewables and nuclear power are growing quickly enough to meet almost all this additional appetite, suggesting we are close to a tipping point for power sector emissions. Governments now need to enable low-emissions sources to grow even faster and drive down emissions so that the world can ensure secure electricity supplies while reaching climate goals."

        Later in the article they quote some people that believe there is no need for nuclear power to lower CO2 emissions, but they are not speaking for the IEA. IEA says renewable and nuclear will lead to lower CO2 emissions in the future, and lower energy prices. Those that claim it's only renewable energy sources that will win over fossil fuels can not speak for the IEA. Just because they disagree doesn't make them wrong. What would prove them w

        • https://ourworldindata.org/nuc... [ourworldindata.org]. Nuclear production in TWh has been pretty much constant for twenty years. Whilst it provides a valuable contribution, the growth is in renewables. The GP is correct in spirit, even if you are technically correct as to the details of the IEA press release. As noted before many times, I'm all fir having nuclear in the mix, but let's be accurate about whether it is nuclear of renewables currently providing growth in low carbon power (it's renewables). THEN we can debate wheth

        • Nuclear is going nowhere in the US. The Vogtle plant reactors in Georgia are are the only nuclear power units under construction in the United States, billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. Maybe NuScale will ship a modular reactor in 2029 but I sure wouldn't bet on it.

    • The significant objection these days is cost not Chernobyl. In many countries nuclear is green lit and has subsidy, but not really getting built because it doesn't attract sufficient investment because other investments are more attractive. Yes, some object for other reasons, but on the whole green issues are only just being taken seriously and NIMBYism hasn't really been the biggest blocker except in a few localities, for example Germany or places that are small, for example Luxembourg.

  • https://earthobservatory.nasa.... [nasa.gov]

    From the NASA article:
    "From the start of satellite observations in 1979 to 2014, total Antarctic sea ice increased by about 1 percent per decade. Whether the increase was a sign of meaningful change is uncertain because ice extents vary considerably from year to year around Antarctica. For three consecutive Septembers from 2012 to 2014, satellites observed new record highs for winter sea ice extent. These highs occurred while the Arctic was seeing record lows.

    The climb came

    • There's a very significant difference between extent and volume. Volume has been falling.
    • Also: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10... [pnas.org] "Following over 3 decades of gradual but uneven increases in sea ice coverage, the yearly average Antarctic sea ice extents reached a record high of 12.8 Ã-- 106 km2 in 2014, followed by a decline so precipitous that they reached their lowest value in the 40-y 1979â"2018 satellite multichannel passive-microwave record, 10.7 Ã-- 106 km2, in 2017. In contrast, it took the Arctic sea ice cover a full 3 decades to register a loss that great in yearly avera

  • According to DoD, aliens "could" have been in those UFOs, since they won't rule out anything. Yeah, genius press secty says "no evidence," but there's apparently no evidence of anything else.

    I am not going to worry about anything that "could" happen according to some advocate.

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