So, let's talk green: Hot news from the Arctic, breaking news from the Antarctic
Two recent scientific observations have brought the focus of the climate change discussion to the Arctic and the Antarctic. The breaking news is that a 1,000-foot-thick ice block is snapping off Antarctica, and the hot news is that the Arctic just had its hottest year on record.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its Arctic Report card: Update for 2016. The report says that the average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2016 is by far the highest since 1900. Air temperatures were 2oC higher than their 1981- 2010 average in the months between October 2015 and September of 2016. Since 1900, temperatures have risen even more than that in the Arctic: 3.5oC. All of this means temperatures in the region continue to climb at double the rate of the planet.
While the Arctic has been warming in summer time, this never happened in winter time. This is what is alarming scientists, because this will now mean that the temperature increase is becoming a year round phenomena.
"The 2016 Arctic Report Card further documents the unravelling of the Arctic and the crumbling of the pillars of the global climate system that the Arctic maintains," said Rafe Pomerance, who is chair of the group Arctic 21 and sits on the Polar Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences. "Governments must urgently work together to establish a future Arctic that minimizes ever greater warming from the loss of sea ice and snow cover and thawing permafrost, and massive sea level rise from the shrinking Greenland ice sheet and other Arctic glaciers."
Moving onto the Antarctic, we have an immense body of data, thanks to NASA's Operation IceBridge Survey. The latest survey in November confirmed a chunk of ice nearly twice the size of Rhode Island state is breaking off an Antarctic glacier, and the rift between it and the southern continent is growing longer and wider every day. The rift is at least 70 miles long, 300 feet wide, and one-third of a mile deep. The 2,300-square-mile ice block is part of the Larsen C Ice Shelf, which is the leading edge of one of the world's largest glacier systems.
While it is normal for ice shelves to calve big icebergs, this 1,000-foot-thick piece of floating ice is massive, and it's quickly fracturing off Antarctica's prominent peninsula. Satellite images suggest the crack began opening up around 2011 and lengthened more than 18 miles by 2015. By March 2016 it had grown nearly 14 miles longer.
"Rifting of this magnitude doesn't happen so often, so we don't often get a chance to study it up close," says Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist and geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in an interview with Business Insider. When asked how long before the ice block breaks off, he said in an email. "Maybe a month, maybe a year."
When the block does break off, it will be the third-largest in recorded history. Computer modelling by some researchers suggests the calving of Larsen C's big ice block might destabilize the entire ice shelf itself, which is about 19,300 square miles. In 2002, a large piece of the nearby Larsen B Ice Shelf snapped off, but within a month, and quite unexpectedly, an even larger swath of the 10,000-year-old feature behind it rapidly disintegrated. The rest of Larsen B may splinter off by 2020.
NASA satellite measurements calculate that since 2004, Antarctica is losing 130 billion tons of ice each year. This is the weight equivalent of 356,000 Empire State Buildings. This dramatic melting of the Arctic and Antarctic could cause serious flooding issues for coastal cities around the world. Losses are estimated to run into trillions of dollars. All we can do now is to find way to adapt to this phenomenon.
