Three to five years
Science News on the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf:
The demise of a West Antarctic glacier poses the world’s biggest threat to raise sea levels before 2100 — and an ice shelf that’s holding it back from the sea could collapse within three to five years, scientists reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.
Thwaites Glacier is “one of the largest, highest glaciers in Antarctica — it’s huge,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the Boulder, Colo.–based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, told reporters. Spanning 120 kilometers across, the glacier is roughly the size of Florida, and were the whole thing to fall into the ocean, it would raise sea levels by 65 centimeters, or more than two feet. Right now, its melting is responsible for about 4 percent of global sea level rise.
Cruise companies are even now planning cruises to go look at the ice shelf while it’s still there.
Satellite data show that over the last 30 years, the flow of Thwaites Glacier across land and toward the sea has nearly doubled in pace. The collapse of this “Doomsday Glacier” alone would alter sea levels significantly, but its fall would also destabilize other West Antarctic glaciers, dragging more ice into the ocean and raising sea levels even more.
Worse than predicted and much much sooner than predicted.
I moved recently. Used to live 11m above MSL, now 320m MSL. It’s feeling like a good choice.
Check out the work of the Sea Level Research Group of the University of Colorado. Best in the business.
Sea level rise is 3.3 +/- 0.4 mm/y, which is 33mm +/- 4 mm/decade, and 330 mm +/- 40 mm per century. But the rate of rise is itself increasing at 0.098 mm/y^2 +/- 0.025 mm/y^2 or ~0.1mm/y^2.
Our descendants could well need scuba gear in order to attend a performance of The Pearl Fishers by Bizet at the (harbourside) Sydney Opera House. Plus slow-incremental but cumulatively massive effects on low-lying agriculatural land world-wide, which will likely in turn become massive refugee-generators. Plus every port city in the world has been built on the assumption of constancy in sea level.
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http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Look on the bright side: In a few centuries Antarctica will be temperate and habitable.
Bruce: My agents tell me that Donald Trump is buying up real estate big-time in Greenland and Patagonia.
I have to admit that I’m always sort of pleased to see approving comments about my alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder. It’s just a bog standard state university in the USA, but somehow they manage to attract top talent. There have been several Nobel Prizes awarded to researchers there. I do find it amusing that Colorado is host to several groups researching glaciers, when there is not a single actual glacier in the state itself. (Although there clearly once were many, judging by the shapes of many high alpine valleys there.)
James @ #5: Ah yes, but Colorado has Steamboat Springs: one of the finest downhill ski resorts in the world; better than Vail; better than Aspen. It has legendary powder.
Here in Australia we have in the Snowy Mountains of NSW and Victoria a greater area of skiable snow than you will find in all of Switzerland. But the powder snow of Colorado is something else again.
Thus it came to pass a few years back that a fellow ski fanatic and myself got on a plane in Sydney, flew to San Francisco and after a few days there, flew up to Steamboat, skied every run there about 55 times each day, up, down & sideways, and then flew back to Australia.
I forget what it all cost, but it was worth every penny.
Muir Woods just north of San Fancisco was amazing too, with its huge redwood trees: a window on what the west coast of the US was once like, before the redwoods were all converted into $$$$.
The coal lobby in Australia has political clout. One can debate temperatures in relation to anthropogenic global warming until one is blue in the face, but the Colorado University Sea Level Group get the figures I cited above from satellite altimetry, the reference point for which is the geographic centre of the Earth. Highly accurate, and good to stop any coal shill dead in their tracks. A brilliant resource.
It’s my understanding that Boulder is a hella fun place to live, too.
James #5:
Not to mention being nowhere near a seacoast for umptymillion years
Omar@6
“Legendary” is almost too mild an adjective! Lort, I do miss being up to my knees in that magical fluffy powder. Here in the PNW where I now live, the snow that we ski is generally known as “Cascade Concrete”: heavy, wet, and SOLID. The plus side is that there is a lot of it: I have skied here in July.