Antarctica Is Changing Rapidly. The Consequences Could Be Dire

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Given space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than other continents – a large sheet of ice contrasting with the dark waters of the southern ocean encircling. Get closer, however, and you will not find a simple ceiling of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interaction between the ocean, sea ice and ice caps and shelves.

This relationship is in serious danger. A new article in the journal Nature Catalog How several “sudden changes”, such as the precipitous loss of sea ice in the last decade, take place in Antarctica and its surrounding waters, reinforcing each other and threatening to send the continent after the point of non -return – and flooding of coastal cities everywhere as the sea increases several feet.

“We see a whole range of sudden and surprising changes developing through Antarctica, but they do not occur in isolation,” said climataiatist Nerilie Abram, the main author of the newspaper. (She conducted research at the Australian National University but is now a chief scientist of the Australian Division of Antarctica.) “When we change part of the system, which has training effects that aggravate changes in other parts of the system. And we are talking about changes that also have global consequences. ”

Scientists define a brutal change as a little environment changing much faster than expected. In Antarctica, these can occur on a range of ladders of times, from days or weeks for a collapse of the ice platform, and centuries and beyond for glacial caps. Unfortunately, these sudden changes can perpetuate and become unstoppable because humans continue to warm the planet. “These are the choices we are making at the moment, and this decade and the next, for greenhouse gas emissions which will be in place these commitments to a long -term change,” said Abram.

An important engine of antarctic cascade crises is the loss of floating sea ice, which forms during the winter. In 2014, he reached a advanced measure (at least since the start of satellite observations in 1978) around Antarctica of 20.11 million square kilometers, or 7.76 million square miles. But since then, the blanket of sea ice has fallen not only precipitously, but almost incredibly, contracting 75 miles closer to the coast. During winters, when sea ice reaches its maximum cover, it decreased 4.4 times more quickly around Antarctica than with Arctic in the last decade.

In other words: loss of winter ice in Antarctica in the last decade is similar to what the Arctic has lost in the past 46 years. “People have always thought that Antarctica did not change compared to the Arctic, and I think that now we see signs that this is no longer the case,” said air conditioning Ryan Fogt, who studies Antarctic at the University of Ohio but was not involved in the new article. “We see just as quickly – and in many cases, more quickly – in Antarctica than in the Arctic lately.”

While scientists must collect more data to determine whether this is the beginning of a fundamental change in Antarctica, the signals have so far been disturbing. “We are starting to see the pieces of the image starting to emerge that we may very well be in this new dramatic loss of antarctic sea ice,” said Zachary M. Labe, a climate that studies the region of the Central Climate Research Group, which was not involved in the new article.