Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
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Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
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Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#2So, if I'm reading the nifty infographic correctly, essentially all of the mass loss occurred between 1997-2000, and the total tonnage has remained consistent or even grown somewhat since 2000 (solid gray line in embedded timeseries chart in the first main figure). The article really tries to focus on the loss aspect, and the amount of ice lost between 1997 and 2000 is certainly shocking - nearly 10,000 gigatons in just a few years! But there hasn't really been any loss overall since about 2000. A complex picture, but maybe encouraging that things haven't deteriorated much over the last 20 or so years?
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#3How do current climate scientists reconcile reporting the relatively slow loss of glacial ice at both poles currently is something that’s unnatural, worrying, proof of humans destroying the planet, a doomsday scenario for life on earth… with the fact that North America was covered by a sheet of ice that was 2-3 kilometres thick only 20,000 years ago. A blink in geological time.
Disclaimer: Yes, human greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change etc etc. Yes we should be moving away from fossil fuels. I wholeheartedly agree with all the correct views. But even the most conservative napkin math on the average loss of ice that occurred long before humans were emitting with more than a few thousand campfires globally is orders of magnitude more than we observe now. And that ignores the fact that melt rate accelerates as mass decreases for ice, which would be expected if humans never existed in the first place.
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#4So, if I'm reading the nifty infographic correctly, essentially all of the mass loss occurred between 1997-2000, and the total tonnage has remained consistent or even grown somewhat since 2000 (solid gray line in embedded timeseries chart in the first main figure). The article really tries to focus on the loss aspect, and the amount of ice lost between 1997 and 2000 is certainly shocking - nearly 10,000 gigatons in j…
I wonder what the mass balance picture looks like when you add in the glaciers on land behind the ice sheets. It seems plausible that the ice shelves that seem be be stable or growing in size may be doing so simply because glaciers are moving out to sea faster than the edge of the ice shelves are calving, but I don't know if that effect is larger or smaller than the accumulation of new ice on the shelves.
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#5How do current climate scientists reconcile reporting the relatively slow loss of glacial ice at both poles currently is something that’s unnatural, worrying, proof of humans destroying the planet, a doomsday scenario for life on earth… with the fact that North America was covered by a sheet of ice that was 2-3 kilometres thick only 20,000 years ago. A blink in geological time. Disclaimer: Yes, human greenhouse gas e…
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#6So, if I'm reading the nifty infographic correctly, essentially all of the mass loss occurred between 1997-2000, and the total tonnage has remained consistent or even grown somewhat since 2000 (solid gray line in embedded timeseries chart in the first main figure). The article really tries to focus on the loss aspect, and the amount of ice lost between 1997 and 2000 is certainly shocking - nearly 10,000 gigatons in j…
Maybe we are looking at different charts, but the one I see says 1997-2021 and the individual glacier lines almost all trend downwards over the whole period.
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#7So, if I'm reading the nifty infographic correctly, essentially all of the mass loss occurred between 1997-2000, and the total tonnage has remained consistent or even grown somewhat since 2000 (solid gray line in embedded timeseries chart in the first main figure). The article really tries to focus on the loss aspect, and the amount of ice lost between 1997 and 2000 is certainly shocking - nearly 10,000 gigatons in j…
It’s really not clear whether the mass balance graph (in the video) shows overall mass balance, or mass balance over time. I think it’s the latter, which would mean the _decline_ has been stable since 2000 (except for two fields which grew). From the study:
> Surface mass balance
> We estimate the SMB of each ice shelf at monthly time resolution using output from three regional climate models
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#8So, if I'm reading the nifty infographic correctly, essentially all of the mass loss occurred between 1997-2000, and the total tonnage has remained consistent or even grown somewhat since 2000 (solid gray line in embedded timeseries chart in the first main figure). The article really tries to focus on the loss aspect, and the amount of ice lost between 1997 and 2000 is certainly shocking - nearly 10,000 gigatons in j…
I'm reading that chart as depicting the amount of mass lost per year, not the total remaining mass. So that means it's consistently losing mass every year
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#9How do current climate scientists reconcile reporting the relatively slow loss of glacial ice at both poles currently is something that’s unnatural, worrying, proof of humans destroying the planet, a doomsday scenario for life on earth… with the fact that North America was covered by a sheet of ice that was 2-3 kilometres thick only 20,000 years ago. A blink in geological time. Disclaimer: Yes, human greenhouse gas e…
https://xkcd.com/1732/
And when you extend it back to 120k years before present?
Or if you don’t use a smoothed averaged-sliding-window for everything except the most recent datapoints you’re trying to draw attention to?
Re: Antarctic Ice Shelf Demise
#10How do current climate scientists reconcile reporting the relatively slow loss of glacial ice at both poles currently is something that’s unnatural, worrying, proof of humans destroying the planet, a doomsday scenario for life on earth… with the fact that North America was covered by a sheet of ice that was 2-3 kilometres thick only 20,000 years ago. A blink in geological time. Disclaimer: Yes, human greenhouse gas e…