from Hacker News

Ice shelf holding back keystone Antarctic glacier within years of failure

by betolink on 12/14/21, 1:03 AM with 44 comments

• by SavantIdiot on 12/14/21, 1:40 AM

  I have a friend who works for an environmental firm in California. They are specialists in identifying 50-100 year climate impact on new commercial construction. Every single project they've been working on for the past decade assumes within the next century there will be extensive sea-level rise wiping out most shorefront properties. He told me about it so glibly I didn't believe him, and he followed it up with: "oh yeah, every construction firm knows the coast is fucked, its common knowledge."

• by kibwen on 12/14/21, 1:36 AM

  > A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise. “That would be a global change,” says Robert DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Our coastlines will look different from space.”

  Fun ("fun") fact, the NOAA has a sea level rise map for the US, so you can see for yourself how this Florida-sized ice sheet impacts the real Florida's coastline.

  Overview: https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map...

  Direct link: https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/

  Select "Sea level rise" on the left and drag the slider up and down. Dark blue is the current sea level, light blue is area that would be inundated.

• by gefhfff on 12/14/21, 1:38 AM

  Well, we can't do anything about it. It basically has already happened through prolonged inaction in the last decades.

  1.5 degree is about to become unreachable. Nobody really cares.

• by elihu on 12/14/21, 2:14 AM

  > In a worst case, this part of Thwaites could triple in speed, increasing the glacier’s contribution to global sea level in the short term to 5%, Pettit says.

  ...

  > A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise.

  So, in the short term this isn't an immediate danger to anyone. In the long term it is, but the trouble with long-term problems is that it's hard to get the political will do do anything. (That's assuming that anything can be done to stop it at this point.)

  On the other hand: maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like climate predictions are getting worse and catastrophes are approaching faster than just the normal passage of time would suggest. Maybe "only centuries away" will be revised down to "only a century away" and then "only decades away" as more information becomes available.

• by sleepysysadmin on 12/14/21, 1:38 PM

  For about 20,000 years straight sea levels have steadily increased.

  https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-educati...

  Whether you like it or not, this is climate change and you cannot deny this. Obviously human activity has no impact on this.

  You might look at more modern reliable data: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

  We're up around 225mm or 22cm or 8inches over the last 100 years.

  https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/

  So about 100 years from now another 8inches or so. Hell, just go 1 foot.

  New orleans, Miami, etc are probably going to need to build something to save themselves.

  This is reality, but they have a long time to handle it.

• by cyberpunk on 12/14/21, 2:16 AM

  Ah fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. I mean. Fuck.

  What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination....

  I sort of hope he doesn't have children, I'm already kinda depressed thinking about the kind of life mine will have, thinking about his, yeeeee. Maybe I'm just too much doom and gloom but..

  Fuck, it's looking dark.

  Is there really any hope? Can we stop ourselves, as we say in scotland, from "fucking it into a tree" ?

  With leaders like Boris, Trump/Biden, Xi and co, Apparently we can't..