{"id":693,"date":"2024-05-20T19:37:31","date_gmt":"2024-05-20T19:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/isog.xyz\/?p=693"},"modified":"2024-05-20T19:37:31","modified_gmt":"2024-05-20T19:37:31","slug":"antarctica-fundamental-climate-shifts-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/isog.xyz\/?p=693","title":{"rendered":"In two new studies, scientists see signs of fundamental climate shifts in Antarctica"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Antarctica’s vast ice fields and the floating sea ice that surrounds the continent are Earth’s largest heat shields, reflecting solar radiation away from the planet. Two studies released today show how global warming is penetrating even the sunlight reflector in the coldest region on Earth.<\/p>\n

Research by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey focused on last year’s staggering decline in sea ice. During the austral winter of 2023, Antarctic sea ice extent was about 770,000 square kilometers below average, an area larger than Alaska. <\/p>\n

Lead author Rachel Diamond said the modeling study showed such an extreme decline would be a one-in-2,000-year event without climate change, “which tells us the event was very extreme,” she said. \u201cAnything less than one in a hundred is considered exceptionally unlikely.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In a separate paper, another team of scientists documented how strong tides push seawater surprisingly far beneath the tongue of the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, reinforcing concerns about accelerating the glacier’s melt and contributing to its rise of sea level.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe intrusion of pressurized seawater will trigger powerful melting of the grounded ice for kilometers, making the glacier more vulnerable to ocean warming and increasing predictions of ice mass loss,\u201d the authors wrote in the paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. . <\/p>\n

\u201cThe concern is that we are underestimating the rate at which the glacier is changing, which would be devastating to coastal communities around the world,\u201d said co-author Christine Dow, professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n

In that study, scientists tracked the course of seawater by analyzing data from sensitive radar instruments that can detect when the surface of the ice rises just a few centimeters. The newly recorded mile-wide intrusion under the ice may be the reason observed ice loss in recent decades has been consistently greater than what is projected by ice sheet models, says lead author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist and climate ice researcher at the University of California. , Irvine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most important thing about the Antarctic sea ice is that it has changed state since 2016,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

Some papers have explained last year’s sea ice decline as an abrupt event, but Rignot has a different perspective.<\/p>\n

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