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West Antarctic Glacier Loss Appears Unstoppable


Gregb

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A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.

 

 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-148

 

Anyone have data on how 4ft sea rise will affect coast lines?

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Yah there were a bunch of pics they showed on MSNBC earlier today. I was going to try to run them down and put them up here.

 

 

We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand... and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late, :phones:

Buffy

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Gotcha covered folks. :help:
I see with a 4ft rise, even though I'm 120+ miles from the coast, parts of my village along the Colubia River will be submerged. :shocked:

Visit the page to use an interactive map. The Facts About Sea Level Rise @ ClimateCentral.org
 

Global warming has raised global sea level about 8 inches since 1880, and the rate of rise is accelerating. Rising seas dramatically increase the odds of damaging floods from storm surges. A Climate Central analysis finds the odds of “century” or worse floods occurring by 2030 are on track to double or more, over widespread areas of the U.S. These increases threaten an enormous amount of damage. Across the country, nearly 5 million people live in 2.6 million homes at less than 4 feet above high tide — a level lower than the century flood line for most locations analyzed. And compounding this risk, scientists expect roughly 2 to 7 more feet of sea level rise this century — a lot depending upon how much more heat-trapping pollution humanity puts into the sky.

Explore

Search or navigate our interactive map tool to see maps of areas below different amounts of sea level rise and flooding, down to neighborhood scale, matched with area timelines of risk. The tool also provides statistics of population, homes and land affected by city, county and state, plus links to factsheets, data downloads, action plans, embeddable widgets, and more.

Edited by Turtle
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Further reading on the study I find it concluded that the ice sheet melt would take about 4000 years. No reason to panic just yet :D

Which article was that? The one linked to in the OP says:

..."This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come," Rignot said. "A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea." ...

Mind you that's a conservative estimate. And while panic is never a good thing -panic being the sudden and unreasoning fear in the face of real or fancied danger- the issue is hardly one to slough off as unimportant.

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Which article was that? The one linked to in the OP says:

Mind you that's a conservative estimate. And while panic is never a good thing -panic being the sudden and unreasoning fear in the face of real or fancied danger- the issue is hardly one to slough off as unimportant.

 

read this

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/study-west-antarctic-melt-a-slow-affair/

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And there they say...

...Several independent specialists on ice sheets and climate said it was premature to conclude from this simulation that fast-paced ice loss from Antarctica was not possible. Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory cautioned that the new findings were based on a single, fairly simple simulation and said that while the results matched well with the seabed evidence, they lacked the precision needed to know what will happen over short periods. ...

Models are great, but no substitute for actual measurements such as those that have precipitated the recent stories. In fact, it's such a big story because the measurements show faster melting than predicted by models. In any case, never put off to tomorrow what you can do today.

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