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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Storm-driven ocean swells have triggered the catastrophic disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves in recent decades, according to new research published in Nature today.
Lead author Dr Rob Massom, of the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, said that reduced sea ice coverage since the late 1980s led to increased exposure of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to ocean swells, causing them to flex and break. "Sea ice acts as a protective buffer to ice shelves, by dampening destructive ocean swells before they reach the ice shelf edge," Dr Massom said. "But where there is loss of sea ice, storm-generated ocean swells can easily reach the exposed ice shelf, causing the first few kilometres of its outer margin to flex."
"Over time, this flexing enlarges pre-existing fractures until long thin 'sliver' icebergs break away or 'calve' from the shelf front. This is like the 'straw that broke the camel's back', triggering the runaway collapse of large areas of ice shelves weakened by pre-existing fracturing and decades of surface flooding."
Study co-author Dr Luke Bennetts, from the University of Adelaide's School of Mathematical Sciences, said the finding highlights the need for sea ice and ocean waves to be included in ice sheet modelling. This will allow scientists to more accurately forecast the fate of the remaining ice shelves and better predict the contribution of Antarctica's ice sheet to sea level rise, as climate changes. "The contribution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently the greatest source of uncertainty in projections of global mean sea level rise," Dr Bennetts said.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:14PM
Not from your story, it isn't. The media wouldn't have been interested in that island being slowly eaten up (or perhaps eaten up in bouts over thousands of years), until houses started sliding into the sea. I grant that global warming presents a plausible scenario with a combination of loss of protective ice and thawed permafrost could result in highly accelerated local erosion. But that might just be a phenomenon that's been repeated for thousands of years. It's only now that we've had a chance to see it in action.
The houses weren't thousands of years old. In the past, they would have just moved inland a bit and nobody would have reported on the situation both due to the lack of media and the lack of drama.
Unless there's a lot of shoreline to erode, such as with the cliffs of Dover.