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Signs of the Doomsday from Antarctica are increasingly evident due to global warming. PHOTO/ DAILY
LONDON – Extreme heat which is currently sweeping the whole world and helping to melt some of the ice floes. This phenomenon strengthens the doomsday signal from Antarctica that is increasingly inevitable.
According to a new study, if global warming is allowed to continue unchecked as it is now, Antarctica could soon pass a “point of no return” that could reduce the continent to arid, even ice-free for the first time in more than 30 million years.
“Antarctica is basically our main legacy from earlier times in Earth’s history. It has existed for about 34 million years,” said study co-author Anders Levermann, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany.
“Now our simulations show that once it thaws, it will not grow back to its original state (until) temperatures return to pre-industrial levels… Very unlikely scenario. In other words, we are losing Antarctica now, lost forever,” he said.
In the study, PIK researchers ran computer simulations to model how Antarctica would look thousands of years from now, depending on how much the average global temperature rises in response to modern greenhouse gas emissions.
They found that, if average temperatures rose 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels over a period of time, much of West Antarctica’s ice would collapse. This resulted in 21 feet (6.5 meters) of global sea-level rise.
An increase of that magnitude would devastate coastal cities like New York, Tokyo and London. This scenario could become a reality in a few decades.
According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a rise in global average temperature of 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) is currently considered a “worst case” warming scenario. This could happen if current levels of greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to continue until 2100.
If global temperatures rise between 11 and 16 degrees F (6-9 degrees C) above pre-industrial levels for a sustained period of time over the next eons, more than 70% of Antarctica’s current ice will be lost “permanently”. And if the temperature rises to 18 degrees F (10 degrees C), the continent must be “virtually ice-free.” If the continents lost all their ice, global sea levels would rise by nearly 200 feet (58 m).
This cataclysmic meltdown is not going to happen in our lives. “The full effect likely won’t be seen for another 150,000 years,” Andrew Shepherd, a climatologist at the University of Leeds in the UK, told the Daily Mail.
However, the study authors warn, humanity’s failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions this century could trigger an irreversible feedback loop. It would seal Antarctica’s fate for thousands of years to come.
The rapid depletion of Antarctic ice shelves – massive sheets of ice anchored ashore on one side and floating freely above the ocean on the other – represents an extremely dangerous feedback mechanism, the researchers wrote.
As warm ocean water flows down the ice shelf, the point where the shelf bottom meets the water (also called the runway line) recedes further and further back, destabilizing the entire shelf and allowing enormous chunks of ice to slide off the land into the sea.
Many of the ice shelves in West Antarctica are already experiencing this kind of melting. About 25% of the region’s ice is in danger of collapsing, according to a 2019 study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The Live Science page said that experts agree that the fate of Antarctica is in the hands of current policy makers. The Paris Climate Agreement, which 73 nations agreed to in 2015 (and which the United States abandoned in June 2017 at the behest of President Donald Trump), aims to limit the planet’s average temperature to not rise more than 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) above pre-industrial averages, to avert the worst effects of climate change.
While emissions fell by a minimal amount at the start of 2020, due to mass quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic, a UN report published earlier this month warned that the world is currently not on track to meet the goals set in the Paris Agreement, with temperatures the global average is staying about 2 degrees F (1.1 degrees C) above pre-industrial levels between 2016 and 2020.
The report adds that there is a 20% chance that annual global average temperatures will increase by more than 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C), at least temporarily, by 2024.
(wbs)
2023-08-19 06:39:26
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