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Al Jazeera America
Glaciers in western Antarctica are melting at an “unstoppable” rate that could cause worldwide sea levels to rise far quicker than previously thought, scientists said in a report released Monday.A team of researchers from NASA and the University of California said the ice sheets will continue to retreat for decades or even centuries to come, regardless of any human effort to reduce carbon emissions a primary cause of climate change – though warming temperatures could accelerate the process.
The new data could mean that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) prediction last month of a three-foot sea level rise by 2100 may have to be increased by as much as four feet, the study said.
The report represents the crossing of a “critical threshold” in understanding Antarctic ice sheets, said researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, who were behind the study.
Conclusions in the report are based on 40 years of observation of the rapidly melting Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica. Six glaciers in the sector have entered an “unstoppable” retreat that has “passed the point of no return,” the researchers said.
“It has been compared to a wine bottle that has a cork at the front, where the cork represents the ice shelf,” said Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at the UC Irvine and glaciologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a conference Monday.
“We’re at the point where we can say the bottle has been uncorked,” Rignot said at a news conference Monday.
The Guardian
The collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet is inevitable and is already underway, scientists said on Monday.The melt will cause up to four metres (13 feet) of additional sea-level rise over the coming centuries, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world – from Bangladesh to New Jersey – that are already expected to be swamped by only a few feet of sea-level rise.
But the researchers said the sea-level rise – while unstoppable – was still several centuries off, potentially up to 1,000 years away.
The study, from researchers at the University of Washington, was one of two sets of findings published on Monday projecting the loss of the western Antarctica ice sheet, the largest remaining grounded repositories of ice in the world.
Scientists at Nasa were also due to publish their research on Antarctic ice on Monday.
Both came to broadly similar conclusions – that scientists are now increasingly sure the thinning and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet has begun. They also suggest that recent accumulation of ice in Antarctica was temporary.
New York Times
The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday.The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis.
“This is really happening,” said Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA’s programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research. “There’s nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow.”
BBC
Key glaciers in West Antarctica are in an irreversible retreat, a study team led by the US space agency (Nasa) says.It analysed 40 years of observations of six big ice streams draining into the Amundsen Bay and concluded that nothing now can stop them melting away.
Although these are abrupt changes, the timescales involved are likely measured in centuries, the researchers add.
If the glaciers really do disappear, they would add roughly 1.2m to global sea level rise.
The new study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, but Nasa held a teleconference on Monday to brief reporters on the findings.
Prof Eric Rignot said warm ocean water was relentlessly eating away at the glaciers' fronts and that the geometry of the sea bed in the area meant that this erosion had now entered a runaway process.
USA Today
The vast glaciers of western Antarctica are rapidly losing ice to the sea and almost certainly have "passed the point of no return," according to new work by two separate teams of scientists.The likely result: a rise in global sea levels of 4 feet or more in the coming centuries, says research made public Monday by scientists at the University of Washington, the University of California-Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"It really is an amazingly distressing situation," says Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, who was not affiliated with either study. "This is a huge part of West Antarctica, and it seems to have been kicked over the edge."
The researchers say the fate of the glaciers is almost certainly beyond hope.
One study shows that a river of ice called Thwaites Glacier is probably in the early stages of collapse. Total collapse is almost inevitable, the study shows.
