“We thought it would take a long time to see any climate impacts in Antarctica. And that's actually not true,” Mottram said, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers and increased surface melting in satellite data.
One early warning sign was the rapid collapse of the ice shelf along the narrow Antarctic Peninsula, which extends north to the tip of South America, he said. Helen Amanda FrickerProfessor of Geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Polar Center at the University of California, San Diego.
Remaining sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula serves as a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where long-term melting is already underway.
Photo: Bob Berwin/Inside Climate News
After a string of record-breaking warm years left a floating block of ice the size of Rhode Island riddled with cracks and meltwater ponds, it disintegrated almost overnight. The thick, ancient ice dam disappeared, and the seven main outlet glaciers behind it accelerated toward the ocean, raising sea levels as the ice melted.
” Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapse “The incident in 2002 was a stunning event in our community,” said Fricker, who was not an author of the new paper. “We just couldn’t believe how quickly it happened in six weeks. Essentially, ice shelves appear immediately, boom, boom, boom, a series of melting streams and melting ponds. And then it all collapsed, shattered into pieces.”
According to her, glaciologists never thought that events in Antarctica would happen so quickly.
Same physics, same changes
Fricker said glaciologists look at changes in Antarctica on a millennial scale, but the collapse of the ice shelf showed that extreme warming could lead to much faster changes.
Current research is focused on the margins of Antarctica, where floating sea ice and relatively narrow outlet glaciers slow the ice cap's movement towards the sea. She described the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a giant reservoir of ice surrounded by a series of dams.
