6 ms·

Ice shelf holding back keystone Antarctic glacier within years of failure

81 points by betolink 5y ago

kibwen 5y ago
> A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise. “That would be a global change,” says Robert DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Our coastlines will look different from space.” Fun ("fun") fact, the NOAA has a sea level rise map for the US, so you can see for yourself how this Florida-sized ice sheet impacts the real Florida's coastline. Overview: https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map-viewer https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map... Direct link: https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ Select "Sea level rise" on the left and drag the slider up and down. Dark blue is the current sea level, light blue is area that would be inundated.
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  Countries would be wise to learn from The Netherlands and start building to protect their coastlines. But most won't. We're just going to accept that the world's most populous cities will be underwater someday, some within a hundred years or so.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Of course they won't. Relocating will create a lot more money than protecting. A protected city doesn't become more valuable, but higher land that I buy now for pennies will become prime coastal real estate by the end of the 21st century.
gefhfff 5y ago
Well, we can't do anything about it. It basically has already happened through prolonged inaction in the last decades. 1.5 degree is about to become unreachable. Nobody really cares.
- gnramires 5y ago
  Mitigation is essentially always an option... no better how bad it is, it can almost always get worse, as the saying goes. Resignation is a very bad life strategy overall.
- steve76 5y ago
  [dead]
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I have a friend who works for an environmental firm in California. They are specialists in identifying 50-100 year climate impact on new commercial construction. Every single project they've been working on for the past decade assumes within the next century there will be extensive sea-level rise wiping out most shorefront properties. He told me about it so glibly I didn't believe him, and he followed it up with: "oh yeah, every construction firm knows the coast is fucked, its common knowledge."
- HNdev1995 5y ago
  How come the real estate market in California is not reacting to this?
  - bamboozled 5y ago
    It’s 50-100 years away.
    - R0b0t1 5y ago
      His surprise is still reasonable, because as time goes on our information will get more precise. So, if this is true, you could buy today and then be unable to sell in 10 years as the market moves.
      - sseagull 5y ago
        This is almost a real life version of the Bottle Imp paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottle_Imp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottle_Imp
  - mym1990 5y ago
    The same reason places like Miami have a red hot market and construction is booming. People either can't fathom sea levels rising to the point of catastrophe, or they think a 50-100 year timeline is long enough to not really be relevant.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
elihu 5y ago
> In a worst case, this part of Thwaites could triple in speed, increasing the glacier’s contribution to global sea level in the short term to 5%, Pettit says. ... > A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise. So, in the short term this isn't an immediate danger to anyone. In the long term it is, but the trouble with long-term problems is that it's hard to get the political will do do anything. (That's assuming that anything can be done to stop it at this point.) On the other hand: maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like climate predictions are getting worse and catastrophes are approaching faster than just the normal passage of time would suggest. Maybe "only centuries away" will be revised down to "only a century away" and then "only decades away" as more information becomes available.
cyberpunk 5y ago
Ah fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. I mean. Fuck. What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination.... I sort of hope he doesn't have children, I'm already kinda depressed thinking about the kind of life mine will have, thinking about his, yeeeee. Maybe I'm just too much doom and gloom but.. Fuck, it's looking dark. Is there really any hope? Can we stop ourselves, as we say in scotland, from "fucking it into a tree" ? With leaders like Boris, Trump/Biden, Xi and co, Apparently we can't..
- jean_valje4n 5y ago
  How many years though? How many years? I mean, the way we're going now, an end is inevitable, but it always was. But, are the number of years within the parameters that we, or I expected? Who knows, some of us are more optimistic about the future, and others less so.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination.... Support legislations to tariffs imports and apply immigration quotas from countries that are not doing their part for the environment (emissions going up instead of down). Recycling might not be as great as you think. 90%+ of the plastic in the oceans are coming directly from Asian rivers and countries that buy "raw" plastic from western countries in order to "recycle" it.
  - toolz 5y ago
    No one buys plastic from the US anymore. The plastic that's recycled in the US goes to a recycling facility that then pays the landfill to bury it with the other trash.
- gnramires 5y ago
  The answer is almost always with collective action. As an individual, our impact or non-impact is very limited. Even if your individual consumption and impact turned to 0, in a world of 7.9 billion other individuals. It's a big tragedy of the commons; this time, only coordination can save us. A shared responsibility. (practically) Everyone, and specially our leaders, need to be on the same page. Disasters will come all at once... we're depleting most minerals as well, pollution will only get worse, and so on. For the lack of a better word, this is Nature's ""test"" to see if we have the ability to 1) Think on a global and collective level; 2) Value the future and not just the immediate present. The default mode of the test is failure, and we seem quite likely to fail anyways. We have to fight very hard. I do believe if we could reach some kind of consensus and mutual enlightenment the technical and social challenge is not that frightening, and maybe we even have a good chance to become a proper space-faring civilization. It's important to be hopeful. A thousand years of a sustainable high technology civilization can achieve what might be approaching the limits of physics of our Universe -- and I'm quite confident colonizing even the galaxy is feasible in such a scenario. The classic on this topic is Scott Alexander's: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ My personal (idealistic, why not? ;) ) plan, my contribution, is to try to come up with a shared formalization of ethics most cultures/countries would accept (a sort of new version of human rights), which includes obvious stuff like valuing human life experience (and in general consciousness) as a primary target of our civilization. Recognizing we are all conscious individuals and so strict individualism is a silly, destructive paradigm, that truth can be well approximated and we can reason collectively towards a shared goal. I really want to prove it -- prove that significant divergences from such basic ethical systems are catastrophic or absurd -- thus we should all, regardless of other beliefs (or religions, or tastes), accept the basic premises and thus have a chance to not only survive, but to live well, to thrive. https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ramgij/the_natural_inefficiency_of_consciousness_and_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ramgij/the_nat...
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
For about 20,000 years straight sea levels have steadily increased. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.earth107/files/Unit2/Mod4/Fig4.6.sea_level.200_ka_0.jpeg https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-educati... Whether you like it or not, this is climate change and you cannot deny this. Obviously human activity has no impact on this. You might look at more modern reliable data: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... We're up around 225mm or 22cm or 8inches over the last 100 years. https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ So about 100 years from now another 8inches or so. Hell, just go 1 foot. New orleans, Miami, etc are probably going to need to build something to save themselves. This is reality, but they have a long time to handle it.

81 points by betolink 5y ago

> A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise. “That would be a global change,” says Robert DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Our coastlines will look different from space.” Fun ("fun") fact, the NOAA has a sea level rise map for the US, so you can see for yourself how this Florida-sized ice sheet impacts the real Florida's coastline. Overview: https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map-viewer https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/sea-level-rise-map... Direct link: https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ Select "Sea level rise" on the left and drag the slider up and down. Dark blue is the current sea level, light blue is area that would be inundated.

forgotmyoldname 5y ago
Countries would be wise to learn from The Netherlands and start building to protect their coastlines. But most won't. We're just going to accept that the world's most populous cities will be underwater someday, some within a hundred years or so.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Of course they won't. Relocating will create a lot more money than protecting. A protected city doesn't become more valuable, but higher land that I buy now for pennies will become prime coastal real estate by the end of the 21st century.

gefhfff 5y ago

Well, we can't do anything about it. It basically has already happened through prolonged inaction in the last decades. 1.5 degree is about to become unreachable. Nobody really cares.

gnramires 5y ago
Mitigation is essentially always an option... no better how bad it is, it can almost always get worse, as the saying goes. Resignation is a very bad life strategy overall.
steve76 5y ago
[dead]

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I have a friend who works for an environmental firm in California. They are specialists in identifying 50-100 year climate impact on new commercial construction. Every single project they've been working on for the past decade assumes within the next century there will be extensive sea-level rise wiping out most shorefront properties. He told me about it so glibly I didn't believe him, and he followed it up with: "oh yeah, every construction firm knows the coast is fucked, its common knowledge."

HNdev1995 5y ago
How come the real estate market in California is not reacting to this?
- bamboozled 5y ago
  It’s 50-100 years away.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    His surprise is still reasonable, because as time goes on our information will get more precise. So, if this is true, you could buy today and then be unable to sell in 10 years as the market moves.
    - sseagull 5y ago
      This is almost a real life version of the Bottle Imp paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottle_Imp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bottle_Imp
- mym1990 5y ago
  The same reason places like Miami have a red hot market and construction is booming. People either can't fathom sea levels rising to the point of catastrophe, or they think a 50-100 year timeline is long enough to not really be relevant.
- jdavis703 5y ago

elihu 5y ago

> In a worst case, this part of Thwaites could triple in speed, increasing the glacier’s contribution to global sea level in the short term to 5%, Pettit says. ... > A collapse of the entire glacier, which some researchers think is only centuries away, would raise global sea level by 65 centimeters. And because Thwaites occupies a deep basin into which neighboring glaciers would flow, its demise could eventually lead to the loss of the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which locks up 3.3 meters of global sea level rise. So, in the short term this isn't an immediate danger to anyone. In the long term it is, but the trouble with long-term problems is that it's hard to get the political will do do anything. (That's assuming that anything can be done to stop it at this point.) On the other hand: maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like climate predictions are getting worse and catastrophes are approaching faster than just the normal passage of time would suggest. Maybe "only centuries away" will be revised down to "only a century away" and then "only decades away" as more information becomes available.

cyberpunk 5y ago

Ah fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck. I mean. Fuck. What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination.... I sort of hope he doesn't have children, I'm already kinda depressed thinking about the kind of life mine will have, thinking about his, yeeeee. Maybe I'm just too much doom and gloom but.. Fuck, it's looking dark. Is there really any hope? Can we stop ourselves, as we say in scotland, from "fucking it into a tree" ? With leaders like Boris, Trump/Biden, Xi and co, Apparently we can't..

jean_valje4n 5y ago
How many years though? How many years? I mean, the way we're going now, an end is inevitable, but it always was. But, are the number of years within the parameters that we, or I expected? Who knows, some of us are more optimistic about the future, and others less so.
908B64B197 5y ago
> What can an individual do these days? I attempted to do my bit, I bought a e-car, I recycle, I try to write efficient code.. But the world my kid is getting is fucked, and while it'll impact me, nothing like what he's in for if I use a bit of imagination.... Support legislations to tariffs imports and apply immigration quotas from countries that are not doing their part for the environment (emissions going up instead of down). Recycling might not be as great as you think. 90%+ of the plastic in the oceans are coming directly from Asian rivers and countries that buy "raw" plastic from western countries in order to "recycle" it.
- toolz 5y ago
  No one buys plastic from the US anymore. The plastic that's recycled in the US goes to a recycling facility that then pays the landfill to bury it with the other trash.
gnramires 5y ago
The answer is almost always with collective action. As an individual, our impact or non-impact is very limited. Even if your individual consumption and impact turned to 0, in a world of 7.9 billion other individuals. It's a big tragedy of the commons; this time, only coordination can save us. A shared responsibility. (practically) Everyone, and specially our leaders, need to be on the same page. Disasters will come all at once... we're depleting most minerals as well, pollution will only get worse, and so on. For the lack of a better word, this is Nature's ""test"" to see if we have the ability to 1) Think on a global and collective level; 2) Value the future and not just the immediate present. The default mode of the test is failure, and we seem quite likely to fail anyways. We have to fight very hard. I do believe if we could reach some kind of consensus and mutual enlightenment the technical and social challenge is not that frightening, and maybe we even have a good chance to become a proper space-faring civilization. It's important to be hopeful. A thousand years of a sustainable high technology civilization can achieve what might be approaching the limits of physics of our Universe -- and I'm quite confident colonizing even the galaxy is feasible in such a scenario. The classic on this topic is Scott Alexander's: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ My personal (idealistic, why not? ;) ) plan, my contribution, is to try to come up with a shared formalization of ethics most cultures/countries would accept (a sort of new version of human rights), which includes obvious stuff like valuing human life experience (and in general consciousness) as a primary target of our civilization. Recognizing we are all conscious individuals and so strict individualism is a silly, destructive paradigm, that truth can be well approximated and we can reason collectively towards a shared goal. I really want to prove it -- prove that significant divergences from such basic ethical systems are catastrophic or absurd -- thus we should all, regardless of other beliefs (or religions, or tastes), accept the basic premises and thus have a chance to not only survive, but to live well, to thrive. https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ramgij/the_natural_inefficiency_of_consciousness_and_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/ramgij/the_nat...

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

For about 20,000 years straight sea levels have steadily increased. https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.earth107/files/Unit2/Mod4/Fig4.6.sea_level.200_ka_0.jpeg https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/sites/www.e-educati... Whether you like it or not, this is climate change and you cannot deny this. Obviously human activity has no impact on this. You might look at more modern reliable data: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/... We're up around 225mm or 22cm or 8inches over the last 100 years. https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/ So about 100 years from now another 8inches or so. Hell, just go 1 foot. New orleans, Miami, etc are probably going to need to build something to save themselves. This is reality, but they have a long time to handle it.