The West Antarctic Ice Sheet covers 760,000 square miles and reaches 1.2 miles. If it were to rise completely, it would add 10 meters to global sea levels. Even considering how fast humans are warming the planet, such a change would likely occur over the centuries we’re talking about here. But scientists are finding more and more evidence that Antarctica’s ice is more vulnerable than previously believed, with many serious changes, such as the loss of sea ice, confirms another.
Now we can add underwater “storms” to the problems that occur around the frozen continent. A new paper shows that the vortices that draw warm water from the expansion of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, known as the Ice Shelf, floating in the southern ocean, will accelerate its destruction.
The water that seems to destroy the shelf actually has triangles. On the other hand, strong winds organize the surface of the sea, compressing it. But driving these storms is the gain and loss of ice: when it freezes, it releases salt, and when it melts, it puts new life into the ocean. This changes the nature of the ocean water, creating vortices that draw warmth from the depths. “They look like a storm,” said lead author Mattia Poinelli, a glacialist at the University of California, Irvine and a contact person at the NASA jet suplsotory laboratory, describing the work in the journal Nature Geoscience. “They have a lot of energy, so there’s vertical movement and there’s turbulence happening near the surface.”
This is bad news for the shelf because it dumps a warm layer of broken water where the ice meets the ocean, which should prevent melting. Some scientists have found that instead of being under the lower underbelly – which will help the installation of the disaster layer – it can not take, creating cycles that produce ice in warm water. . Clare Eayrs, a climate scientist at the Korea Polar Research Institute, was not involved in the new paper.
Problems under the shelf are bad news for the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Think of the Floating Bit as a cork stuck in a glacier resting on earth. If melting on the shelf is less than it makes it easier to break apart, the sheet will move faster into the ocean, raising global sea levels.
Not helping matters is the dramatic decline in sea ice around the continent. All those chunks used to act as a buffer, absorbing the energy of the wave that would otherwise dissipate on the shelf and break up. Sea Ice also helps keep ocean temperatures cool: because it’s white, it reflects the sun’s energy back into space, but with dark water exposed, the ocean instead absorbs that heat.
As the sea ice disappears and the shelf clears, new water is added to the ocean, which means more storms that drive the melt – and on. “In the future, when there will be warmer water, more melting, we will probably see more of these effects in different parts of Antarctica,” said Poinelli.
These storms can also help explain Antarctica’s ‘land recovery’, “when the ice lifts the land and begins to float in the ocean. Researchers have found that as new water flows under the ice sheet and into the ocean, it creates turbulence that pulls the warm water, accelerating the reduction. Earlier this month, a different group of researchers used data from a quarter of a century ago to find a return to the line up to 2 300. When that happens, the water warm seas can reach other parts of the ice, feed on the ice and make the whole paper system stable.
And now the Hurricanes can add to this offensive line. “This research provides a powerful mechanism for a small but powerful storm that pulls under the ice and accelerates melting,” said Pietro Milillo, a physicist at the University of Houston who led the paper but was not involved in the storm research. “The kind of recovery we see in our database can be explained in part by these underwater storms.”
How much melting we might see from these storms remains an open question. Again, the discovery came out of the model, although Poinelli said that scientists have seen the potential elsewhere in Antarctica. Scientists desperately need more data to get a better idea of how quickly the ice will end and, as a result, how quickly it will recover. “Sometimes we think that the ICE Sheet is less responsive to change, but this work, and our work, reminds us that Antarctica can change on timescales of days or weeks,” said Milillo. “We need to monitor the bottom of the ice shelf with the same urgency we look for hurricanes.”
This article originally appeared on Grist in incrofit, an independent news organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and the foreseeable future. Learn more at Grist.org.
