Here, water temperatures could warm by one to two degrees Celsius, which could reduce the future stability of the AIS and. The scientists found the net loss of ice from Antarctica, along with Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet, has been responsible for 14mm of sea level rise between 2003 and 2019 – slightly less than a third of the total amount of sea level rise observed in the world’s oceans. He has been a scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since 2001. Using the most advanced Earth-observing laser instrument NASA has ever flown in space, scientists have made precise, detailed measurements of how the elevation of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have changed over 16 years. Using the ridges as a proxy for ice shelf retreat, the study estimates that ice could have pulled back up to 40 to 50 meters (131 to 164 feet) per day. “We can show that sometime in the relatively recent past, retreat rates in excess of 10 kilometers per year are possible
,” Dowdeswell, the paper’s author and director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, told Earther. In 1985, he discovered the RMS Titanic, and has succeeded in tracking down numerous other significant shipwrecks, including the German battleship Bismarck, the lost fleet of Guadalcanal, the U.S. aircraft carrier Yorktown, and John F. Kennedy’s boat, PT-109. He is a Boston Sea Rover and a member of The Explorers Club; his home and laboratory are on the south coast of Massachusetts. WHOI’s pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering—one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in basic and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. The risk of rapid ice shelf collapse could raise sea levels 10 feet or more, and researchers are trying to understand just how fast the retreat could be. Now, we can set more realistic expectations of what’s possible in Antarctica. Research simulates dramatic climate impacts for future Antarctic ice sheet melt. “Simply put, previous climate models have not addressed how all that fresh water coming out of the AIS might impact future climate.”, “We found that future meltwater coming off Antarctica leads to huge amounts of thick sea ice around the continent,” adds Sadai, lead author of the study and PhD graduate student of Condron. from the University of Auckland, and Ph.D. from James Cook University, North Queensland, Australia. It’s hard to know when exactly they happened or over how long a period of time. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. The instrument’s pulse rate allows for a dense map of measurement over the ice sheet; its high precision allows scientists to determine how much an ice sheet changes over a year to within an inch. She loves Earther forever. He and six other scientists with the University of Cambridge were setting off as part of an expedition to study the ancient patterns of ice sheet retreat along the peninsula, what is one of today’s most vulnerable ice shelves. That gave them the elevation change, but to get to how much ice has been lost, the researchers developed a new model to convert volume change to mass change. These findings should serve as a warning: The current situation sucks, and it could get a lot worse. “These first results looking at land ice confirm the consensus from other research groups, but they also let us look at the details of change in individual glaciers and ice shelves at the same time,” says Tom Neumann, ICESat-2 project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. As the ice thins, it can lift off the seafloor and begin to bob with the tide. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu. It is habitually a key and busy time for…. But the loss of ice from the continent’s margins, especially in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, far outweighs any gains in the interior. They have found that ice sheet retreat rates 10,000 years ago make today’s rate of retreat look like baby steps. His most recent book, The Shark Handbook, is a must buy for all shark enthusiasts. Glaciologists recognize three ice sheets in Antarctica: the Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet (APIS), the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). He has written dozens of scientific research papers and has appeared in a number of film and television documentaries, including programs for National Geographic, Discovery Channel, BBC, and numerous television networks. The results provide insights into how the polar ice sheets are changing, demonstrating definitively that small gains of ice in East Antarctica are dwarfed by massive losses in West Antarctica. All this additional sea ice dramatically slows the pace of future warming around Antarctica, the researchers report, which is seemingly welcome news. However, given the distance from the actual seafloor, these maps were of a lower resolution. “It’s important to note that this is not a global ‘cooling’ scenario as average global temperatures would still be roughly three degrees Celsius warmer than today due to human greenhouse gas emissions, even with the cooling effects of this melt water on climate,” says Condron. The more they rise, the higher the stakes for coastal communities that’ll face increased flooding and disaster as a result. What happens to Antarctica’s ice has everything to do with what comes next for the coasts. He uses techniques that span isotope geochemistry, next generation DNA sequencing, and satellite tagging to study the ecology of a wide variety of ocean species.