From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
We've been watching another extraordinary tv show about our planet.
You can watch all 10 episodes online, here:
One Strange Rock:
https://www.fox.com/one-strange-rock/
See all this, and I guarantee you'll think more like I do. :)
And less like the idiot, Slider. LOL.
***
Now here's the latest bad news...
Antarctica Is Melting Three Times as Fast as a Decade Ago
The continent’s rate of ice loss is speeding up, which is
contributing even more to rising sea levels.
By Kendra Pierre-Louis
June 13, 2018
http://tinyurl.com/y76wxsaw
Excerpts:
Between 60 and 90 percent of the world’s fresh water is frozen in the ice sheets of Antarctica, a continent roughly the size of the United States and Mexico combined. If all that ice melted, it would be enough to raise the world’s sea levels by
roughly 200 feet.
While that won’t happen overnight, Antarctica is indeed melting, and a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature shows that the melting is speeding up.
The continent has lost nearly three trillion tons of ice since 1992.
The rate at which Antarctica is losing ice has tripled since 2007, according to
the latest available data. The continent is now melting so fast, scientists say, that it will contribute six inches (15 centimeters) to sea-level rise by 2100. That is at the
upper end of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated Antarctica alone could contribute to sea level rise this century.
“Around Brooklyn you get flooding once a year or so, but if you raise sea level by 15 centimeters then that’s going to happen 20 times a year,” said Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds and the lead author of
the study.
Even under ordinary conditions, Antarctica’s landscape is perpetually changing as icebergs calve, snow falls and ice melts on the surface, forming glacial sinkholes known as moulins. But what concerns scientists is the balance
of how much snow and ice
accumulates in a given year versus the amount that is lost.
Between 1992 and 2017, Antarctica shed three trillion tons of ice. This has led
to an increase in sea levels of roughly three-tenths of an inch, which doesn’t seem like much. But 40 percent of that increase came from the last five years of the study
period, from 2012 to 2017.
Antarctica is not the only contributor to sea level rise. Greenland lost an estimated 1 trillion tons of ice between 2011 and 2014. And as oceans warm, their waters expand and occupy more space, also raising sea levels. The melting
ice and warming waters
have all been primarily driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
Dr. Shepherd and his team ran similar calculations five years ago, using 20 years of data, but were unable to say much except that Antarctica seemed to be losing mass at a steady rate. They discovered the acceleration in the rate of ice loss when they
did the calculations again for this study, this time with an additional five years of data.
“Now when we look again, we can see actually that the signal is very different to what we’ve seen before,” Dr. Shepherd said. The rate of sea level rise due to Antarctic ice loss has tripled since 2012 alone, he said.
Advancements in Earth-observing satellites have enabled researchers to better understand the polar regions. Many researchers once thought the polar regions would add ice as the climate warmed, because warmer temperatures lead to more moisture in the
atmosphere, which leads to more rain, and, they thought, more snow at the poles. Direct observation from satellites upended that view.
Researchers like Dr. Shepherd fear that future knowledge from satellites is at risk, however. Budgets proposed by the Trump administration have called for a reduction in some Earth observation programs.
“We depend upon the satellite measurements to not only tell us how the ice sheets respond but also to make these calculations to sea level contribution,” Dr. Shepherd said.
The satellite observations also show what’s driving the loss of ice in Antarctica. “This study shows that we’re actually losing more mass along the edges of the ice sheet, where the ice sheet is making contact with the ocean, and that the warming
oceans are melting the ice,” Dr. Koppes said. “They’re melting the ice at
rates that far exceed anything that would change in the air, and these are forces that you can’t reverse easily.”
***
Of course, I must conclude by pointing out that President 'Tump'
is doing everything he can to make the entire situation worse.
Tump has been actively *undoing* everything Obama had done to
mitigate the situation and hasn't developed any new strategies
of significance, even blatantly *favoring* dirtier energy sources
like coal and oil over renewable energy sources.
.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)