Antarctica Has Lost 7.5tn Tonnes of Ice Since 1997, Scientists Find 71
More than 40% of Antarctica's ice shelves have shrunk since 1997 with almost half showing "no sign of recovery," a study has found, linking the change to the climate breakdown. From a report: Scientists at the University of Leeds have calculated that 67tn tonnes of ice was lost in the west while 59tn tonnes was added to the east between 1997 and 2021, resulting in a net loss of 7.5tn tonnes. Warm water on the western side of Antarctica has been melting ice, whereas in the east, ice shelves have either stayed the same or grown as the water is colder there. The ice shelves sit at the end of glaciers and slow their rate of flow into the sea. When they shrink, glaciers release larger amounts of freshwater into the sea which can disrupt the currents of the Southern Ocean.
Dr Benjamin Davison, an expert in Earth observation and the study's lead, said: "There is a mixed picture of ice-shelf deterioration, and this is to do with the ocean temperature and ocean currents around Antarctica. The western half is exposed to warm water, which can rapidly erode the ice shelves from below, whereas much of east Antarctica is currently protected from nearby warm water by a band of cold water at the coast." Scientists measured year-by-year changes to the ice using satellites that can see through the thick cloud during long polar nights.
Dr Benjamin Davison, an expert in Earth observation and the study's lead, said: "There is a mixed picture of ice-shelf deterioration, and this is to do with the ocean temperature and ocean currents around Antarctica. The western half is exposed to warm water, which can rapidly erode the ice shelves from below, whereas much of east Antarctica is currently protected from nearby warm water by a band of cold water at the coast." Scientists measured year-by-year changes to the ice using satellites that can see through the thick cloud during long polar nights.
tn? (Score:2)
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Re:tn? (Score:4, Informative)
tonne = 1000kg. tn = trillion.
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I really didn't get whether we were talking about land ice or sea ice or a mixture of the two. The significance is that if it were sea ice, it has no impact on sea level. If it were land ice, it does.
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I have a 10k gallon pool. Adding 100 gallons (1%) raises the water level about 0.44 inches.
If that person's math is right then the same percentage of water added to my pool would raise the water level some tiny fraction of a inch.
I'd have to look up the metric scales to find which term is half a trillion times smaller than an inch.
So, math says this much water added to the ocean will add nothing detectable to the height of the oceans. Where do you get 7 meters?
Is his math wrong or yours?
I used an online p
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Where does the 7m calculation come from? I've seen the number before. So what? Where is the math?
Argument from authority is a rhetorical fallacy. The math should be really easy to generate. I can give you the link to my pool depth calculator and the dimensions of my pool. Link for 7m, please?
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If his math is correct it will take longer than this planet will still be here to raise 7m at that rate of increase.
And if we have to sacrifice anything at all as a species to prevent a 7m rise over thousands of years then that is a stupid thing for us to do. The sea level has already risen so much in the last few thousand years that many ancient coastal cities are now under water and forgotten and so what?
Your argument is a good case for doing nothing. Is that where you meant to go with this in the effor
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I never said it was related to the amount of water already in the ocean. It is related to the square footage of ocean.
My example pool was based on the pool's square footage. The gallon number I gave was just to say 100g is only 1% which yields on,y a .44 inch rise.
The future thousands of years from now does not matter at all. Not a bit. By that time we'll either be wiped out from any number of things or have advanced so much the climate won't be an issue. Are you upset the Romans salted the earth at Ca
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ice is quite reflective. the more you lose the faster you lose more of it. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is about 30 million cubic kilometers, and you can be forgiven for assuming that a few cubic kilometers of lost ice is insignificant in comparison. But simple metrics like volume don't really communicate the impact that changes to a 45-60 million years old ice can have.
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American trillion or British trillion?
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I'm told that 'short trillion' is the commonplace nowadays. Aka 10^12
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Wrong question.
You should have asked African or European.
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Indeed, the necessary follow up to complete the equation. Thank you.
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The British government has been using the short scale in public communications since the 1970's. Just how old are you, and where have you been staying for the last 50 years?
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Is a trillion the same as a billion? Or a billiard or whatever they call it over there?
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I believe the old British "billion" is equivalent to the US "trillion". Although now the British supposedly use the "short scale" as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The "tonne" is a metric measurement for 1000 kilograms. This is opposed to the "ton" which can be a "long ton" for 2240 pounds, or "short ton" which is 2000 pounds, both of which are approximately one "tonne" for some historical conversion of pounds to kilograms.
For more see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The "tonne" is a metric measurement for 1000 kilograms.
Not really. There are 3 types of ton: long, short and metric. The first two are archaic.
"Tonne" is the UK spelling of ton, and so informally implies metric in the US. But in other (most?) countries, a "ton" means 1000kg, and tonne is just an alternative spelling. We don't prefix things with "metric", since that is the default.
Metric is so easy. A cubic metre of water is one ton, so a billion tons is a cubic km. 7.5terra-tons is 7500 cubic km of water, or a bit over 8000 cubic km of ice.
Oceans cove
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1 tonne is 1 megagram. Therefor 7.5 trillion tones is 7.5 petagrams. I hope that makes everything clear.
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Which side is west? (Score:3)
Aren't they all the north side?
Re: Which side is west? (Score:2)
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The West side of Antarctica [wikipedia.org] is the part that is in the Western Hemisphere, and the East side is in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Simple math (Score:3)
Each pound of ice you make in your fridge, costs about 3 pounds of ice from Antartica to make.
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Well it doesn't help if all the ice is Antarctica when I need it in San Diego, now does it!
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This actually supports what I said, which is great.
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Re:Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Scam (Score:5, Informative)
Venus is the hottest planet in solar system with a temperature of 467 Celsius, despite getting only 1/4 of the solar energy that Mercury does.
If it wasn't for the greenhouse effect, the Earth's average temperature would be -18 Centigrade instead of +14 degrees.
Re:Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Scam (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, look, somebody fact-checked the lie you are pushing:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]
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they should have gone back an additional year (Score:1)
They should have gone back an additional year because the discrepancy would have been about 1/7th less.
If they had used maximum instead of minimum, their grant woulnd't have been approved....its nearly identical.
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It's a barbaric amount (Score:2)
Units (Score:2)
Scientists at the University of Leeds have calculated that 67tn tonnes of ice was lost in the west
Fortunately, scientists did not use such a fancy unit [science.org] as tn tonnes. They used "billion tonnes (Gt)". Gt stands for gigatonnes.
Too bad The Guardian used 'tn tonnes'.
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Not Library of Congress's, or football stadiums, or Titanics, or Everests?
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Scientists at the University of Leeds have calculated that 67tn tonnes of ice was lost in the west
Fortunately, scientists did not use such a fancy unit [science.org] as tn tonnes. They used "billion tonnes (Gt)". Gt stands for gigatonnes.
The Guardian making a 'factor of a thousand error' in their reporting would be news, so I had to go and read the article, and you're right, the paper's authors did use Gt, albeit as follows: "We find that Antarctic ice shelves exported 67,000 ± 3200 billion tonnes (Gt) of freshwater to the Southern Ocean from 1997 to 2021"
Perhaps you'd like to now weigh in on what a thousand Gt (or a Tt) is in common parlance?
Too bad The Guardian used 'tn tonnes'.
Why, exactly? It's far more readable. I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who unde
"More frightening than nuclear war" (Score:1)
According to Joe Biden global warming is "more frightening" (which I assume implies being a greater threat to human civilization) than nuclear war.
Here's a clip of the video: https://twitter.com/DanielTurn... [twitter.com]
I'm sure someone will try to complain about the source, being that it is Twitter or "just some rando", but it's live video of Joe Biden in his own words. If this is some "deep fake" construct, or whatever, then the involved parties did a very good job.
We heard it from POTUS, global warming is a greater
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do you always listen to joe biden? I mean.. it's joe biden.
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do you always listen to joe biden? I mean.. it's joe biden.
No, I do not always listen to Joe Biden but I would assume others might. I happen to agree with him on this point, but disagree on what actions need to be taken in response. If global warming is a greater threat than nuclear war then that kind of says something about how we should view nuclear fission as a future energy source, would anyone give some reason to disagree?
The warnings of how global warming threatens humanity has only gotten more dire with time, and so I would think at some point this should
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While I am not disagreeing with anything you are saying lets just relax a bit more and not go into drastic alarm mode.
I'm not raising any more alarm than anyone else on this. I'm making a very simple "if this then that" observation. If global warming is the threat that it is being made out to be then any opposition to nuclear fission as an energy source is also a threat. We have POTUS, IPCC, and many other prominent sources raising the alarm of global warming, and if we are to take them seriously then that means reconsidering past decisions on what we can and should do about the problem.
What we've heard from the banshee
follow the science, but not too closely... (Score:1)
You mean "follow the science that agrees with you" and when that science changes. "ignore the new science and follow the old science that used to agree with you pretending it's still current.
What a clown you are argStyopa.
usual argStyopa anti-science and deciet (Score:1)
You're first link's headline
What’s behind the surprising growth of one Antarctic ice sheet?
So only 1 and not total.
Irrelevant
your second link
Change in Antarctic ice shelf area from 2009 to 2019
So area and not the volume discussed here.
Also irrelevant
Your third link is also area and therefore also irrelevant.
Your fourth link is about a decade old, although you pretend it's to a current study.
The satellite they are waiting for to provide better data "ICESat-2, which is scheduled to launch in 2018" has already been launched and in use for many years.
I wonder why you didn't link to any of that data...
I don't really
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...this is the opposite of what a number of other research publications have been saying, well, for DECADES.
https://www.euronews.com/green... [euronews.com]
https://tc.copernicus.org/arti... [copernicus.org]: "Our observations show that Antarctic ice shelves gained 661âGt of ice mass over the past decade, whereas the steady-state approach would estimate substantial ice loss over the same period, demonstrating the importance of using time-variable calving flux observations to measure change."
This is about sea ice increasing in mass due to the high rate of loss of ice from land. TFA is about land ice. This article supports TFA.
p> https://eos.org/science-update... [eos.org] "Recent research offers new insights on Antarctic sea ice, which, despite global warming, has increased in overall extent over the past 40 years. "
This is about sea ice area. TFA is about land ice volume/mass.
p> https://www.antarcticajournal.... [antarcticajournal.com] "A new NASA study on the Antarctic Ice Sheet says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeâ(TM)s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
According to the new analysis of satellite data, the Antarctic Ice Sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to present. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008."
#followthescience, right?
This one is about land ice mass but stands out as basically the only one in thirty years that comes to this conclusion.
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This one is about land ice mass but stands out as basically the only one in thirty years that comes to this conclusion.
Yes, it's an old study, it's obvious if you look at all the dates in it. And all the deniers keep using it and pretending it's current. "A new study"... from 2015... deceitful little fuckers. argStyopa is one of the worst.
not funny at all (Score:1)
Why do you keep on lying and claiming scientists think the ice is increasing?
Why are you so anti-science?
Key Takeaway: Antarctica is losing ice mass (melting) at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year, and Greenland is losing about 270 billion tons per year, adding to sea level rise.
How highs the water mama? (Score:2)
How many Eiffel Towers is that? (Score:2)
I was kind of hoping for a unit of measurement I could relate to, like maybe, killer whales or Greyhound buses!