Antarctica has lost 7.5tn tonnes of ice since 1997, scientists find

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tahlyn@reddit

You know what happens when a glass of water has ice but it's exposed to ambient heat? It stays cold. It stays cold while the ice absorbs the heat. And then it gets hot as fuck. Right now we are the glass of water. The ice has almost all run out.

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LotterySnub@reddit

This is under appreciated: It takes 4.184 joules to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius-that's the specific heat capacity of water. It takes 333 J of energy to melt gram of ice. 333 / 4.184 = 79.59 The energy it takes melt a gram of ice at 0C (32F) is enough to raise the temperature of a gram of water almost 80C (143 F) Once the arctic sea ice disappears things will accelerate faster than “faster than expected”.

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tahlyn@reddit

Venus by Tuesday.

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norrata@reddit

Venusian 1 here we come

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nosesinroses@reddit

Mars for the rich.

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CanoodleCandy@reddit

Honestly... who would even want to go with them. Could you imagine that nightmare?! Might be best to stay here and burn/boil honestly.

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norrata@reddit

🤙

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ThatOvershooter@reddit

Thanks for the crystal clear explanation. It was such a revelation when I first realized how the physics of this phenomenon work, and how dire the repercussions are. This is why BOE (=blue ocean event - fully melted arctic ice in the summer, coming to the planet near you shortly) matters. Also, this is why we are so utterly fucked. Once the ice goes, the weather will go even more haywire than it already is, and I wouldn't be surprised if even rich countries saw widespread famine shortly after. Tipping points like BOE are brutal, and we're already over the threshold of triggering so many of them that it's just insane! Yet, I still see gasoline powered cars wherever I go and airplanes flying in the sky. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills every single day. Why can't the world just change already? What are we waiting for? Ugh...

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they_have_no_bullets@reddit

As you noted, tipping points have crossed. Stopping fossil fuel consumption now is too late to have any impact because shit is about to hit the fan in just a couple years regardless

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owheelj@reddit

Luckily the ice isn't that close to running out yet. There's 109,000 trillion tonnes in total, and in this study they found 7.5 trillion has been lost from 1997 to 2021. No doubt the rate of loss is going to increase over time though. Also most of this ice is on land, not sea ice.

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tahlyn@reddit

Assuming no acceleration that's 14.53 periods of 24 years or about 350 years, but it will accelerate. Assuming the periods gets 1/3 shorter every time we've got 70 years, if they get 1/2 shorter each time we've got 50 years. Mire conservatively, 10% shorter we've got 185. It's not reassuring.

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owheelj@reddit

Your maths isn't correct, but my figures weren't either. You seem to have missed the thousands on the weight. If we use my figures there's 109,000 trillion tonnes. At a loss of 7.5 trillion per period that's 14,533 periods. 24*14533 = 348,800 years. But I used completely the wrong figure for the amount of ice. The correct figure is 24,380 trillion tones, which gives us only 3250 periods or 78000 years. The other issue of course is the fallacy of extrapolation. Antarctic winter has no sunlight for months. Higher temperatures will mean more moisture in the air and the potential for more rain. The temperature in winter will almost certainly drop below zero even in a massively warmer world. More moisture will mean more rain, snow, and ultimately more ice. There will probably be non-linear relationships where the amount of ice decreases exponentially, stabilises and may then increase, depending on alternate climate states. It will depend on what the warmer, moister air does. In any event there will likely be bigger seasonal swings.

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tahlyn@reddit

Whoops, you're right! I did 109, not 109,000. That's a LOT better... 1000 times better, even!

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MistakeNotMyIrony@reddit

The lane ice IS the one to worry about, it isn’t already displacing its own in seawater, so results in sea level rise as it melts and flows into the ocean.

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daviddjg0033@reddit

“We expected most ice shelves to go through cycles of rapid, but short-lived shrinking, then to regrow slowly. Instead, we see that almost half of them are shrinking with no sign of recovery.” ... faster than expected

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CreatedSole@reddit

Almost like the planet is heating up exponentially every year since the industrial revolution. No way, it couldn't possibly be that, must just be an a anomally/s.

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LotterySnub@reddit

Most introductory statistic courses only introduce linear curve fitting. The general population seems unclear about the implications of exponential growth/decay in a finite world and an unstable climate.

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Synthwoven@reddit

It would be nice if the stats classes could at least touch on the point that if each new data point causes you to redraw your linear curve fit with a new steeper slope, then you are not looking at linear behavior and might want to try some other curve fit.

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LotterySnub@reddit

Sadly, in California community colleges any student, no matter their mathematical background, can enroll in statistics. It is a joke of a class these days. Some students can’t compute the mean of a sample with nice round numbers and a calculator.

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dkorabell@reddit

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/11/17/the-seduction-of-the-exponential-curve/?sh=3860fa002480](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/11/17/the-seduction-of-the-exponential-curve/?sh=3860fa002480) "that lesson is this: exponential growth cannot be sustained. The inventor can't be paid because well before you get to the end of the chessboard, you run out of grain! You've hit the physical limitations of the math, and as a consequence, the growth either leads to a dramatic downturn..." As in .. bring out your dead. It will happen well before the end of the century. I can't say exactly where we're at on the curve or how bad it gets & how soon. But, Population growth, Climate change, The expenditure of finite fossil fuels - these are all on exponential curves. At some point, probably within fifty years, if nothing is done - a really big shit is going to hit a really big fan.

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LotterySnub@reddit

Faster than “faster than expected “.

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CreatedSole@reddit

"UnPrEcEdEnTeD".

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BeardedGlass@reddit

And worse.

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CRTsdidnothingwrong@reddit

>More than 40% of Antarctica’s ice shelves have shrunk since 1997 So have 60% of them grown? It's very hard to read anything about Antarctic Ice without feeling like they are cherry picking data.

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chatonnu@reddit

From wikipedia: "the ice sheet weighs about 24,380,000 gigatonnes." From NASA: "our best estimate is that 49,000 gigatonnes of ice has melted into the ocean since 1900." So, 49,000/24,380,000 is about 0.2%. It bugs me that these articles never give you percentages.

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owheelj@reddit

The study here is claiming the net loss is 7.5 trillion tonnes.

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chatonnu@reddit

Okay. I wish they would say billion tons instead of gigatons. So 7.5 trillion tons is 7,500 gigatons. The article claims we are now losing 1300 gigatons per year, up from the previous century's average of about 400 gigatons. And probably accelerating. And 320 gigatons of melt result in about 1mm of sea level rise. So we're seeing about 3mm of sea level rise per year and accelerating. Which equates to about 300,000 "climate refugees" per year. Things really are falling apart.

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Self-Medicated-Dad@reddit

Is that a lot?

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imminentjogger5@reddit

seriously I need a % rather than just a number

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mondogirl@reddit

40% loss since 1997

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IWantToGiverupper@reddit

40% of sea ice, right? Or like 40% of entire ice? Because if it’s the later that is mind boggling

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owheelj@reddit

No, the study found that 40% of ice sheets have lost some amount of ice. The actual net loss is significantly less than 0.1%. It's ice sheets across the whole continent, not sea ice.

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LotterySnub@reddit

The study is the first of its kind to examine all the ice that is disappearing on Earth, using satellite observations. The survey covers 215,000 mountain glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans.

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owheelj@reddit

No, 40% of ice sheets have lost some amount. And the net loss is 7.5 trillion out of 109,000 trillion in that time.

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ratcuisine@reddit

Hmm, 40% or [0.2%](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/176j4nf/antarctica_has_lost_75tn_tonnes_of_ice_since_1997/k4nj9t2/)?

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imminentjogger5@reddit

ty

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Wise_Rich_88888@reddit

That 60% remaining is gonna go faster than the first 40%

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BamBamVroomVroom@reddit

Of course it's A LOT

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liminus81@reddit

USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world weighs around 100,000 tons So this is 7.5 million USS Gerald R. Ford's worth of ice

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Sarcastic_Beaver@reddit

Now how many football fields?

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liminus81@reddit

The USS Gerald R. Ford is 333m long and has an average width of roughly 60m; this gives an area of 19,980 m^2 An American football field has an area of roughly 5,350 m^2 (including the end zones) So the R. Ford is about 3.7 football fields 3.7x75,000,000 is 227,500,000 So 227.5 million football fields Except the flight deck of the R. Ford is about 15m above the waterline So as a measure of volume it's 227.5 million football-field-R.Ford-flight-decks Then bear in mind that steel is about 8 times denser than ice

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DubbleDiller@reddit

holy cannoli

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klyrish@reddit

This is fine.

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elydakai@reddit

ahh fuck

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LotterySnub@reddit

A tonne is a lot. A trillion is a big number. A trillion tonnes is not a lot, it is mind bendingly, enormously huge. 7.5 trillion tonnes is even more!

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subfutility@reddit

Can you put in Manhattan’s or California’s for us maybe?

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thesourpop@reddit

about 1,350,000,000,000,000 average americans

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tahlyn@reddit

New York City produces 14 million tons of trash a year. It would take over 500,000 years to generate that many times of trash. New York City buildings weigh 762 million tons. The ice list is about the weight of 10 Manhattans. https://www.nyc.gov/site/sustainability/codes/waste.page https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230523-new-yorks-skyscrapers-are-causing-it-to-sink-what-can-be-done-about-it

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shortroundsuicide@reddit

This guy numbers

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CaptainBirdEnjoyer@reddit

It is over 9000.

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inteblio@reddit

It bugs me that "scientists" always used _concervative_ estimates to sound sane, so those were what society _was expecting_. But not the most likely.

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gal_fednki3600@reddit

7.5 tons doesn't sound so bad. What's that now? 7.5 TRILLION tons? *checks notes* Well, fuck...

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Glad_Studio6003@reddit

https://scitechdaily.com/our-planet-is-losing-ice-at-record-rate-in-line-with-the-worst-case-climate-warming-scenarios/

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residentchiefnz@reddit

And this article is 30 months old.. shit’s got worse since then!!

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Plastic-Somewhere494@reddit

That doesn't sound like a lot at all

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imminentjogger5@reddit

how many tons of ice does Antarctica have now?

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chatonnu@reddit

24 million gigatonnes

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here-i-am-now@reddit

Two tree

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Hobo-of-Insight@reddit

7.5 tonnes is all? Thats not as bad as I thought.

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jarrydn@reddit

Multiply that by a trillion

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Wise_Rich_88888@reddit

Trillion with a tr? That seems like a lot.

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jarrydn@reddit

I can confirm that a trillion is indeed a lot!

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ManyReach7296@reddit

You missed a trillion.

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futurefirestorm@reddit

Definitely the biggest number of the day. It doesn’t sound like Antarctica can recover. Bye.

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Tesla-Punk3327@reddit

But Just Stop Oil is the problem.

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Imnot_your_buddy_guy@reddit

Titanic’s revenge

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holdmybeer123456789@reddit

https://scitechdaily.com/our-planet-is-losing-ice-at-record-rate-in-line-with-the-worst-case-climate-warming-scenarios/

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pwnw31842@reddit

It should be more careful then

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Potost@reddit

Data through 2021. Doesn't even take into account the record of sea ice this year, this antarctic summer is going to be wild.

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No-Cantaloupe6106@reddit

its always a laugh seeing people be like, look at this scary trend graph! and every time, the X axis goes to like 2018 or something.

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StatementBot@reddit

The following submission statement was provided by /u/conscsness: --- Submission statement: Davison’s remarks and the recent Antarctic climate research underscore a quickening pace of environmental deterioration, notably in the diminishing of ice shelves and alterations in climate. Such discoveries stoke apprehensions about the escalation of sea levels, extreme meteorological phenomena, and the depletion of various species. From an anthropological viewpoint, Jared Diamond’s work “Collapse” delves into the role environmental elements play in causing civilizations to fall apart. Likewise, scholars such as Elizabeth Kolbert have described the current Anthropocene era as a period where human activities have left a considerable imprint on Earth, potentially paving the way for widespread extinctions and the crumbling of societies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/176j4nf/antarctica_has_lost_75tn_tonnes_of_ice_since_1997/k4miyu7/

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StatementBot@reddit

The following submission statement was provided by /u/conscsness: --- Submission statement: Davison’s remarks and the recent Antarctic climate research underscore a quickening pace of environmental deterioration, notably in the diminishing of ice shelves and alterations in climate. Such discoveries stoke apprehensions about the escalation of sea levels, extreme meteorological phenomena, and the depletion of various species. From an anthropological viewpoint, Jared Diamond’s work “Collapse” delves into the role environmental elements play in causing civilizations to fall apart. Likewise, scholars such as Elizabeth Kolbert have described the current Anthropocene era as a period where human activities have left a considerable imprint on Earth, potentially paving the way for widespread extinctions and the crumbling of societies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/176j4nf/antarctica_has_lost_75tn_tonnes_of_ice_since_1997/k4miyu7/

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BigSeltzerBot@reddit

Imagine Antarctica becoming a muddy, desolate wasteland after all the ice is gone. It's a desert, no? So I assume there wouldn't be a lot of vegetation growing there if it became warm enough.

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StatementBot@reddit

The following submission statement was provided by /u/conscsness: --- Submission statement: Davison’s remarks and the recent Antarctic climate research underscore a quickening pace of environmental deterioration, notably in the diminishing of ice shelves and alterations in climate. Such discoveries stoke apprehensions about the escalation of sea levels, extreme meteorological phenomena, and the depletion of various species. From an anthropological viewpoint, Jared Diamond’s work “Collapse” delves into the role environmental elements play in causing civilizations to fall apart. Likewise, scholars such as Elizabeth Kolbert have described the current Anthropocene era as a period where human activities have left a considerable imprint on Earth, potentially paving the way for widespread extinctions and the crumbling of societies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/176j4nf/antarctica_has_lost_75tn_tonnes_of_ice_since_1997/k4miyu7/

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StatementBot@reddit

The following submission statement was provided by /u/conscsness: --- Submission statement: Davison’s remarks and the recent Antarctic climate research underscore a quickening pace of environmental deterioration, notably in the diminishing of ice shelves and alterations in climate. Such discoveries stoke apprehensions about the escalation of sea levels, extreme meteorological phenomena, and the depletion of various species. From an anthropological viewpoint, Jared Diamond’s work “Collapse” delves into the role environmental elements play in causing civilizations to fall apart. Likewise, scholars such as Elizabeth Kolbert have described the current Anthropocene era as a period where human activities have left a considerable imprint on Earth, potentially paving the way for widespread extinctions and the crumbling of societies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/176j4nf/antarctica_has_lost_75tn_tonnes_of_ice_since_1997/k4miyu7/

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conscsness@reddit (OP)

Submission statement: Davison’s remarks and the recent Antarctic climate research underscore a quickening pace of environmental deterioration, notably in the diminishing of ice shelves and alterations in climate. Such discoveries stoke apprehensions about the escalation of sea levels, extreme meteorological phenomena, and the depletion of various species. From an anthropological viewpoint, Jared Diamond’s work “Collapse” delves into the role environmental elements play in causing civilizations to fall apart. Likewise, scholars such as Elizabeth Kolbert have described the current Anthropocene era as a period where human activities have left a considerable imprint on Earth, potentially paving the way for widespread extinctions and the crumbling of societies.

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