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Fact: Earth's colossal ice sheets are melting:
Pay attention to Greenland.
The land's colossal ice sheet — around three times the size of Texas — is melting some 270 billion tons(opens in a new tab) of ice into the sea each year as Earth warms. And the inevitable sea level rise could be worse than scientists calculated: Researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) found that warmer ocean water is seeping underneath and amplifying melting of Greenland's mighty Petermann Glacier, which ends in a great ice tongue floating over the sea. The scientists recently published their research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The glacier lies in northern Greenland, a realm of the high Arctic. But that frigid location can no longer protect it. Scientists found the glacier is vulnerable to the incessantly warming seas. It's another whammy for melting Greenland, which is melting from above (warmer air) and below (warmer water).
Until 2015, satellite observations showed Petermann, a major ice outflow on Greenland, was in solid shape. Not anymore.
"Something changed during the last decade. Petermann was supposed to be a place where the ice was still stable," Enrico Ciraci, a NASA postdoctoral fellow and an Earth system scientist at UCI, told Mashable.
Ice loss is now ramping up.
"Warming oceans are accelerating the mass loss of this glacier," Ciraci, who led the research, said.
Not even the coldest glaciers are immune.
"It's surprising even Petermann isn't escaping the impacts of global warming," Josh Willis, a NASA oceanographer who researches melting in Greenland and had no involvement with the new research, told Mashable.
[...] For some of us, sea level rise might not be nearly as apparent or poignant as the increase in inferno-like Western wildfires, record-breaking heat waves, vanishing Arctic ice, and historic deluges. But it's happening, and it's speeding up.
Since the late 19th century, global sea levels have already risen by some eight to nine inches. Sea level rise each year more than doubled from 1.4 millimeters over most of the 20th century, to 3.6 millimeters by the early 21st century. From just the years 2013 to 2018, that number accelerated to 4.8 millimeters per year.
Yet, crucially, most sea level rise simulations and predictions don't take into account what's happening under Petermann and the many glaciers like it. This means we might be underestimating sea level rise over the coming decades and beyond. In the study, the researchers noted that such ocean melting "will make projections of sea level rise from glaciers potentially double."
"This process is not accounted for in many models today for sea level rise," Ciraci explained. "The potential contribution is significant."
Journal Reference:
Enrico Ciracì, Eric Rignot, Bernd Scheuchl, et al., Melt rates in the kilometer-size grounding zone of Petermann Glacier, Greenland, before and during a retreat [open], PNAS, 2023 120 (20) e2220924120. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2220924120
(Score: 0, Troll) by VLM on Monday May 15, @06:20PM (6 children)
Is the 'problem' using metrology as a political weapon, or do you mean climate change itself is the problem? I know which one is more likely and its not the latter.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday May 15, @07:46PM (5 children)
The way I see things, the fact that anything can become a "political weapon" (political football...) is the problem. You'd think / hope that the more advanced people and society become, the more we could work together collectively on important things. There are solutions, and we would be far ahead of the climate problem if people were more pragmatic and less dogmatic.
Nuclear power would have made a huge reduction in the current CO2 output. When I was a kid the Three Mile Island accident [wikipedia.org] made huge headlines. People were shouting and marching with torches and pitchforks (figuratively, not literally) about how there would be major health problems for years. AFAIK, nobody was hurt, even though it was surely a very significant accident. Fortunately it was taken very seriously by everyone involved, and to date the people who run nuclear power stations take safety as seriously as you possibly can. However the public opinion / political / economic damage was done and the US stopped building new nukes.
All that said, we (the US) are getting better as are so many other countries. It takes time to make these changes, and we're doing it slowly. Energy-consuming products are becoming more and more efficient, more and more electric cars and trucks in use, more and more PV and wind generation is being installed.
Some facts: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/ [worldometers.info]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday May 15, @08:53PM (4 children)
Sorry, but no, the people who run nuclear power plants DON'T "take safety as seriously as you possibly can". They've got management that takes all the "cost containing measures" that they can get away with. (Possibly you aren't counting management as part of "the people who run nuclear power plants", but they need to be counted.
Of course, the problem is also that a lot of the "required safety precautions" don't really make things safer. It's a difficult problem, with no good answers. The Navy usually manages, with extremely highly trained crews in a military environment. And at a horrendous cost. I don't think you could manage that in a civilian environment. (And the Navy has had a few problems too, but they didn't make headlines.)
In my opinion the real problem is with spent fuel There still isn't any good place to store it, so it just accumulates in places that it shouldn't. That was one of the major problems at Fukushima, and they're not the only folks doing it. There are also occasionally a lot of problems with site selection. Nuclear plants are big and heavy, and you shouldn't just plunk them down anywhere, but frequently is seems that this isn't given sufficient consideration. And there's not enough consideration to the costs of decommissioning the plants. (And ensuring that the money required to properly do that isn't siphoned off to some other use.)
Done right, nuclear power would be an excellent choice. Our track record isn't good. Problems are left to accumulate, companies responsible for a task divert the funds to some other purpose, and then go bankrupt, etc.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday May 15, @09:20PM (2 children)
Your reaction seems almost angry, and I'm sad for you. I actually work occasionally in the nuclear power industry, literally on safety systems, so I know, all too well, first hand, how stringent they are. They _all_ take it _very_ seriously.
I take it that you're blending everything together in one homogeneous pot? I understand the problem of spent fuel, and that's not my area but AFAIK storing it onsite is the currently accepted method. I don't like it either. Transporting and handling it incurs (much) more risk. What do you suggest?
Fukushima is hindsight, and I'm in the US, so I can't speak to Japan's nuclear safety. I'm sure you know as well as most people that the tsunami was much worse than anyone had anticipated. You can argue all you want, but you'd be wasting your time arguing with me because I never said Fukushima was safe enough. I will say, that tsunami was much worse than scientists predicted could ever happen. I'll also say that like TMI and Chernobyl, scientists and engineers are learning and improving, and there's not much more we can do.
Again, do you have any positive helpful suggestions? Or just venting?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 16, @06:39PM (1 child)
As a safety professional you really should inform yourself of the complete clusterfuck that was Three Mile Island.
They absolutely did cut safety precautions. They then lied their asses off at every step of they way including dramatically understating release quantities.
And, cancer rates did increase afterwards as a likely after effect. [nih.gov]
If the current state of the regulatory landscape is better it is likely a direct result of that near-industry-killing event.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 16, @06:45PM
And just for the record I support properly regulated nuclear power.
It's just that I blame the owners of TMI for blowing up a plant and almost killing nuclear energy, not the environmentalists who were just telling the truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @07:08AM
Sure, our track record isn't great but we really aren't any better when it comes to oil either. For some reason we just seem to care less when we have oil-related disasters, probably because using oil is so much more deeply entrenched in almost every aspect of our lives. It's much harder to say "holy shit that was bad, we need to stop building things that burn oil" than it is to say "holy shit that was bad, we need to stop building things that use nuclear fission".
We have both enormous ecological disasters like the Deepwater Horizon spill [wikipedia.org] as well as companies leaving the public holding the bag when they go bankrupt, such as with orphan wells [wikipedia.org] . And that's not even considering the devastating effects of climate change.