Word: icing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most dangerous part of the Antarctic ice cap is in the west, where much of the continent lies slightly below sea level. Ice shelves that fringe the land keep the seawater out, but if those should melt, the water would rush in and destabilize the larger sheet, leading to slipping, more melting and the possibility of a catastrophic collapse. Picture New Orleans when the levees overtopped; now picture the flooding going global...
...Once a runaway instability starts, it cannot be stopped until a new stable position is found [for the ice sheet]," writes geophysicist Erik R. Ivins in an editorial accompanying the Science paper. (See pictures of this fragile earth...
...would be most susceptible to a collapse too widely, including, for example, the Antarctic Peninsula, which the paper calls "both topographically and glaciologically distinct from the WAIS," mostly because it lies largely above sea level. Its higher elevation would put it out of reach of coastal meltwater, keeping its ice cover primarily intact. What's more, even within the areas of the WAIS that lie below sea level, there are localized spots that poke above it, and these too would be relatively safe. Factoring in these and other mitigators, Bamber's team reran the computer models and came up with...
...ice that would melt into the ocean even in Bamber's updated, less extreme models might be small compared with the overall mass of the Earth, but that redistribution of mass would still cause the planet's gravity field to change slightly, which, in turn, would change the vector of its rotation. Think of the way water sloshes in a bucket, varying by how you swing or carry it. On a vast scale, that's what would happen if the WAIS collapsed, and the direction of the sloshing would hit the U.S. especially hard. Other areas that would take...
...multinational climate summit set to convene in Copenhagen this December all the more pressing. And if you need one more reason to hope we at last get warming under control, consider this: The new study did not even consider the sea-level impact of Greenland, glaciers and other ice-capped lands melting. Add that water to the bucket, and you ought to get things sloshing but good...