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Bolding mine.Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what's likely to be a centuries-long process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.
"There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies released Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place."
The findings from Joughin and his colleagues, published in the journal Science, indicate that in some places, Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is losing tens of feet, or several meters, of ice elevation every year.
They estimate that Thwaites Glacier would probably disappear entirely in somewhere between 200 and 1,000 years. That loss would raise global sea levels by nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters). The glacier serves as a linchpin for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which has enough frozen mass to cause another 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) of sea level rise.
A second study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, reports the widespread retreat of Thwaites and other glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and says the retreat can't help but continue.
"It has passed the point of no return," the research team's leader, Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine, told reporters during a NASA teleconference on Monday.
The glaciers are melting much faster than scientists had previously estimated, Rignot said, a development that means forecasts for sea level rise worldwide – like those released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year – will have to be revised upward in a significant way.
"This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come," Rignot said in a NASA press release, adding that "a conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea."
West Antarctic Ice Sheet's Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning - NBC News
By Alan Boyle
First published May 12th 2014, 12:02 pm
Bolding mine.Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what's likely to be a centuries-long process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet.
"There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies released Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place."
The findings from Joughin and his colleagues, published in the journal Science, indicate that in some places, Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier is losing tens of feet, or several meters, of ice elevation every year.
They estimate that Thwaites Glacier would probably disappear entirely in somewhere between 200 and 1,000 years. That loss would raise global sea levels by nearly 2 feet (60 centimeters). The glacier serves as a linchpin for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice sheet, which has enough frozen mass to cause another 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) of sea level rise.
A second study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, reports the widespread retreat of Thwaites and other glaciers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and says the retreat can't help but continue.
"It has passed the point of no return," the research team's leader, Eric Rignot of the University of California at Irvine, told reporters during a NASA teleconference on Monday.
4 feet is enough to put cities like New York in great danger.
4 feet is enough to put cities like New York in great danger.
TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS of $$$ would be lost if the oceans rose that much. It would bankrupt insurance companies
4 feet is enough to put cities like New York in great danger.
TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS of $$$ would be lost if the oceans rose that much. It would bankrupt insurance companies
And if it's set to happen you can spend trillions and trillions of dollars trying to stop it and will fail because it's not within our control.
TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS of $$$ would be lost if the oceans rose that much. It would bankrupt insurance companies
And if it's set to happen you can spend trillions and trillions of dollars trying to stop it and will fail because it's not within our control.
Adapting to it is within our control. Adapt we will be forced to.
Centuries long process? Isn't that what coming out of an ice age is like? Prior to the beginning of the ice age that the earth is now exiting there was little, if any, ice at either of the poles. Is there any reason to expect that the earth won't return to the temperature before the beginning of the ice age which will be so warm that little if any ice will remain at the poles just as it has done over and over and over again?
Don't we get this kind of warning every year?
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Centuries long process? Isn't that what coming out of an ice age is like? Prior to the beginning of the ice age that the earth is now exiting there was little, if any, ice at either of the poles. Is there any reason to expect that the earth won't return to the temperature before the beginning of the ice age which will be so warm that little if any ice will remain at the poles just as it has done over and over and over again?
Hilariously ignorant babbling gobbledygook with almost no connection to reality. As usual from SSooooDDuuumb.
The last period of heavy glaciation (popularly, the last ice age) ended about eleven to twelve thousand years ago. Since then the Earth has been in an interglacial period called the Holocene. For the last two and a half million years, the Earth has been in a long major Ice Age, called the Quaternary Glaciation, with approximately 100,000 year long periods of heavy glaciation broken by 12 to 30 thousand year long interglacial periods. Over that time there has always been large amounts of ice at the poles. That is the definition of an 'Ice Age'.
We are not "coming out of an ice age", as the denier retard claims. The Earth came out of the last period of glaciation over ten millennia ago. The Earth warmed a little bit more after that large warming that ended the 'ice age', through a period called the Holocene Thermal Maximum, and then it started to cool slowly for the last 5000 years.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The last glacial period is sometimes colloquially referred to as the "last ice age", though this use is incorrect because an ice age is a longer period of cold temperature in which ice sheets cover large parts of the Earth, such as Antarctica. Glacials, on the other hand, refer to colder phases within an ice age that separate interglacials. Thus, the end of the last glacial period is not the end of the last ice age. The end of the last glacial period was about 10,500 BCE, while the end of the last ice age may not yet have come.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The last glacial period ends with the cold Younger Dryas substage (11,500 - 12,800 BP).
The Holocene is a geological epoch which began at the end of the Pleistocene[1] (at 11,700 calendar years BP) [2] and continues to the present. The Holocene is part of the Quaternary period. Its name comes from the Greek words ὅλος (holos, whole or entire) and καινός (kainos, new), meaning "entirely recent".[3] It has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1 and based on that past evidence, can be considered an interglacial in the current ice age.
The Holocene also encompasses within it the growth and impacts of the human species world-wide, including all its written history and overall significant transition toward urban living in the present. Human impacts of the modern era on the Earth and its ecosystems may be considered of global significance for future evolution of living species, including approximately synchronous lithospheric evidence, or more recently atmospheric evidence of human impacts.
It is accepted by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that the Holocene started approximately 11,700 years BP (before present).[2] The period follows the last glacial period (regionally known as the Wisconsinan Glacial Period, the Baltic-Scandinavian Ice Age, or the Weichsel glacial).
Climate has been fairly stable over the Holocene.
