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Ocean Waves Following Sea Ice Loss Trigger Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse

posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 16 2018, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the slippery-slope dept.

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.

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:26PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday June 17 2018, @12:26PM (#694218) Journal

    You don't understand the methods used to collect the data (nor have you attempted to collect the data yourself, I'm guessing). Therefor, that data can't possibly exist or be accurate. Ergo, any claims that climate change is happening must be exaggerated to push an agenda.

    It's telling that you can't come up with a better argument than merely another variation of the same fallacy. Runaway should have spent a few hundred thousand dollars of public funds collecting data for years before making his post. What was he thinking? But I'm sure you did that data collection yourself, right? After all, nobody on the internet would advise someone to do something time-consuming and onerous that they wouldn't do themselves.

    But I guess if we made everyone spend years on collecting data before they could write anything on the internet, it'd cut back on the crap somewhat.