Antarctica (Page 8)

?and it’s our fault – No matter how cold this winter has been, the truth is: The world is getting warmer. Scientists studying climate change have long believed that while most of the rest of the globe has been getting steadily warmer, a large part of Antarctica?the East Antarctic Ice Sheet?has actually been getting colder. But new research shows that’s not true?the whole earth is warming up, and we can’t blame it on sunspots: Alas, it’s our fault.
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Recently pictures of “frozen waves” from the Antarctic have been floating around the internet, pretending to show that it’s so cold down under that ocean waves are literally freezing as they break. The reality is that it’s summer in the southern hemisphere, and it has been so hot that Adelaide, Australia has experienced a once in 3,000 year heat wave, and now a huge ice shelf has unexpectedly collapsed in Antarctica. The Wilkins Ice Shelf was expected by scientists to last at least another 15 years, so the collapse of this section came as a surprise. It has caused scientists to revise their expectations for the survival of the rest of the shelf, which will soon join the Larsen and others, which have already melted.read more

Antarctica hasn’t always been ice free in times of global warming but alas, it’s certainly melting now. Parts of the ice sheets covering Antarctica are melting even faster than predicted. NASA scientist James Hansen says that we have to hold our greenhouse gas emissions to 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The problem is, we’re ALREADY at 383 parts per million.
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