Month: May 2014

Tweet Two papers have appeared today which, in the words of Richard Alley, are the equivalent of the guys over in the corner screaming bloody murder.  Both describe the coming, and in their view, inevitable collapse of the West Antarctic ice shelf at some point in the next 200-900 years.  While the exact time of collapse is not predictable, the inevitability is, and 200 years is not so long in the future. Rignot, Mouginot, Morlighem, Seroussi and Scheuch map the observed retreat of these grounding glaciers, and over the past twenty years, and yes, once they let go, there is nothing holding the ice shelf back from lurching into the Southern Ocean.  They conclude Using two decades of ERS-1/2 data, we document a continuous and rapid retreat of the grounding lines of Pine Island, Thwaites, Haynes, Smith and Kohler glaciers, which drain a large sector of West Antarctica on a retrograde, submarine bed, a configuration deemed unstable by ice sheet numerical models (e.g. Favier et al., 2014, Katz and Worster, 2010; Parizek et al., 2012) unless normal and tangential ice shelf buttressing could increase significantly (Gudmundson, 2013), which is unlikely.