There are signs Antarctica just live its highest melt extent ever record in the satellite era . The big meltdown come to on Christmas Eve and is speculative news for a continent alreadydealingwitha plenty . With summertime is just getting started there , this is a serious compositor’s case of Summertime Sadness .
Antarctic is the largest stash of ice on the planet . Warm oceans have puzzle the biggest threat to that chicken feed by undercutting the water ice shelf that swim out into the sea , peculiarly the tongue of ice around West Antarctica . But airfoil thaw could become a openhanded fear , and the Christmas Eve meltdown is indicative of the concerns . Preliminary findingsfrom modeling done at the University of Liège in Belgium show that the percentage of open mellow on the continent spiked on December 24 . The modeling uses atmospheric condition forecasts to assume surface melt . Because the surroundings is so harsh in Antarctica , atmospheric condition station data is rugged to do by so these are best estimates .
south-polar surface dissolve season starts in mid - November and runs into February . Late December and former January are the height of the melting season . On average , just eight percent of Antarctica ’s surface melt at the peak . But this year has been anything but average , with everyday since late November showing well above normal Earth’s surface thawing extent . That culminate in a giving melt spike on Christmas Eve when about 16 percentage of the continent ’s icy open function into nuclear meltdown .
Poor penguin, poor us.Photo: Getty
That ’s an area equivalent to the size of Denmark . West Antarctica — home to some of the most endangered ice on the planet — has seen the worst of the thaw season harmonise to the University of Liège information . But even the unremarkably moth-eaten and gamey East Antarctic has n’t escaped a more weak fortune .
When the surface melt , a glaze of ice can organise when it refreezes . But if enough ice melting , then the melt can have water to start pooling on the surface or flow and sneaking into ice cracks , where it can fracture the chicken feed apart . Scientists have observed this in theheart of Antarctica , but Antarctic Peninsula hashad it the bad .
Robin Bell , a geophysics prof at Columbia University ’s Lamont - Doherty Earth Observatory , say Earther that if this melt continue or worsens , it could hasten the collapse of the ice shelves already under threat from below . And that could pose serious risks to people who live along the coast by grant res publica sparkler to catch on into the sea .
A graph showing the normal melt season, the maximum and minimum values, and what’s happened in 2019.Image: University of Liège
“ [ The ice shelf are ] kind of like the phellem in the feeding bottle . They ’re hold back a lot of the icing in Antarctica , ” Bell sound out . “ It means you ’re pumping more ice into the ocean , and that ’s what weigh for ocean level . ”
Antarctic is unfortunately not the only stash of ice to be dealing with more extreme thaw time of year . Researchers have observed thesame phenomenon in Greenlandas well . This summer ’s melt time of year set arecord for daily chalk lossas a result of open melting . Greenland has been themain contributorto sea level rising . With Antarctica ’s ice loss accelerating , we ’re starting to get into dangerous district .
AntarcticaGlobal warmingice frosting possibly
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