This story originally appeared on GRIST and is part of the Climate office 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 Bethaeen the ocean, sea ice and ice caps and shelves.
This relationship is in serious danger. In the news paper In the Journal Nature Catalogs, several “sudden changes”, such as the precipitous loss of the sea in the last decade, take place in Antarctica and its surrounding waters, reinforcing each other and threatening to send the continent beyond the point of no return-and the flood of coastal citias everywhere while the sea is several feet.
“We see a whole range of sudden and surprising changs developing through Antarctica, but they do not occur in isolated way,” said the climato-scientific Nerilie Abram, the main author of the newspaper. (She conducted research at the Australian National University but now a chief scientist of the Australian Division of Antarctica.) “When we change one of the systems, which has training effects that aggravate changes in other parts of the system. And we are talking about changes in 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 ice platform colipse, and centurias and beyond for ice caps. Unfortunately, these sudden changes can be self-perpetuated and become unstoppable while 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 sincen, the blanket of sea ice faces not only precipitously, but almost incredibly, contracting 75 miles closer to the coast. During winters, when sea ice reaches its maximum cover, it has decreased 4.4 times more quickly around Antarctica than Arcic in the last decade.
In other words: loss of winter ice in Antarctica in the last decade is similar to what the Arcic has lost in the past 46 years. “People have always thought that Antarctica did not change the arcics, 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 the involution of the news. “We see just as fast – and in many cases, more quickly – a change in Antarctica as the Arcines lately.”
While scientists must collect more to determine whether it is the beginning of a fundamental change in Antarctica, the signals have so far been homonderant. “We supposed to see the pieces of the image before emerging that we could very well be in this new dramatic loss of anterctic sea ice,” said Zachary M. Labo, a climate that studies the region of the Central Climate Research Group, which was not involved in the new article.
