Month: February 2022

From the video:

The Thwaites Glacier is a massive glacier in Antarctica about the same size as Florida, and it's dangerously close to collapse, like possibly within the next five years.

Scientists recently sent a submarine under the ice shelf at the foot of the glacier and this is what bumps up against the continental ridge under the ocean and basically acts like a doorstop, holding the rest of the glacier back.

What they saw was way worse than anybody was expecting. It was thinner than they thought and there were obvious fracture points. This is a process that's already started. If this ice shelf breaks apart, it will basically set the rest of the glacier in motion and send it pouring out into the sea. If the ice shelf itself gets loose in the ocean, it could raise global sea levels by one to two feet.

It wouldn't happen overnight; it's a glacier. It moves at glacial speeds but it would definitely speed it up big time. For example, they used to think it would be like the year 2100 or so before we see that level of sea rise, but now they're thinking it might be 2050 or 2060. And one to two feet is bad enough, but once that glacier ice melts in the ocean, it could raise the sea level by six to eight feet, which we could see by 2100.

And just to add an extra dash of Yikes! to the whole thing, just like the way the ice shelf is holding back the Thwaites Glacier, it's though that losing the Thwaites Glacier could trigger a loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and this could add a total sea level rise of 11 feet when all is said and done.

Considering that 40% of the world's population lives in urban areas near coastlines, it would be a massive problem. So basically the fate of about 3.2 billion people are in the hands of one relatively small strip of ice holding back this massive glacier which itself is holding back an even bigger ice shelf. And that small strip of ice is crumbling before our eyes.

Now again, this isn't a next year kind of thing, even if the ice sheet falls apart tomorrow it would take decades for the glacier to fully flake off into the ocean and even more decades to melt. But once that ice shelf goes, it'll basically set forth some events that can't be stopped. It will be an event that affects our descendants for hundreds of years.

Unless we manage to drastically lower the global temperature, meaning removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and do it in the next couple of decades [me, laughing hysterically], which not only are we not removing them or even slowing their growth, and the fact is we are accelerating our emissions. 2021 was a record year; sorry…another record year.

So it's not like this ice shelf collapse would trigger a global tsunami or anything like that, though some headlines definitely made it sound like that. I saw one headline that described it as a "Don't Look Up" level event. A bit of an exaggeration, but it's the tipping point; one that we don't really have any way of coming back from. And just another reason why our great, great, great grandkids are just gonna really hate us.