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Maybe. Maybe not. New study, reported on at SciTechDaily,
The world's largest ice sheets may be in less danger of sudden collapse than previously predicted, according to new findings led by the University of Michigan.
The study, published in Science, included simulating the demise of West Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier, one of the world's largest and most unstable glaciers. Researchers modeled the collapse of various heights of ice cliffs—near-vertical formations that occur where glaciers and ice shelves meet the ocean. They found that instability doesn't always lead to rapid disintegration.
"What we found is that over long timescales, ice behaves like a viscous fluid, sort of like a pancake spreading out in a frying pan," said Jeremy Bassis, U-M associate professor of climate and space sciences and engineering. "So the ice spreads out and thins faster than it can fail and this can stabilize collapse. But if the ice can't thin fast enough, that's when you have the possibility of rapid glacier collapse."
Or, not.
[...] "There's no doubt that sea levels are rising, and that it's going to continue in the coming decades," Bassis said. "But I think this study offers hope that we're not approaching a complete collapse—that there are measures that can mitigate and stabilize things. And we still have the opportunity to change things by making decisions about things like energy emissions—methane and CO2."
[...] "The ocean is always there, sort of tickling the ice in a very complex way, and we've only known for a decade or two just how important it is," he said. "But we're beginning to understand that it's driving a lot of the changes we're seeing, and I think that's going to be the next big frontier in our research."
Journal Reference:
J. N. Bassis, B. Berg, A. J. Crawford, et al. Transition to marine ice cliff instability controlled by ice thickness gradients and velocity [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abf6271)
(Score: 5, Informative) by https on Monday June 21 2021, @02:39PM (2 children)
I don't know if you noticed, but we failed to act and right now we're kinda fucked [youtube.com]* environmentally and climaticly. Except for the ozone layer. Oh, wait, that's because we collectively fucking well did something about it right fucking quick.
You might as well be a paid shill for Exxon.
* 37 seconds NASA animation
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @04:03PM (1 child)
So, replacing invariably failed hyperbolic predictions with an arbitrary color mapping is supposed to be *more* compelling to me?
Here [nasa.gov] are the actual data for your video which present things much more clearly than some pointless colorization. Okay, the temperature has increased approximately 1 degree in 140 years. And I'll happily grant it continuing to increase. During periods such as the Cretaceous you're looking at degrees 10+ above what we have today, all ice sheets melted, and CO2 concentrations upward of 1200ppm. And we had a lush green planet full of a massive diversity of life that thrived with a complete absence of tools or technology.
Even if we burned literally all oil we currently have we will not hit even remotely close to those levels. And anything like a Venus style runaway effect is literally impossible. So the fear is over the next century or two, people will be gradually driven to either move inland or to technologically resolve the encroaching seas? And this somehow equals "we're fucked". Stuff like this makes me feel like people *want* to feel scared.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22 2021, @04:18PM
It isn't so much that "we've been warmer" it is that we are warming very fast. Life can adapt to most any condition, as long as it has time. The trouble is, we aren't giving it time. I think Randal Monroe stated it quite well here:
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
Basically, a mass extinction takes place when the environment changes faster than evolution can account for:
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-5-major-mass-extinctions-4018102 [thoughtco.com]
The Oxygen catastrophe killed most of the species alive at the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event [wikipedia.org]
The fact that life worked around it eventually is nice, but just because life will survive such a cataclysm doesn't mean humans will.