Spelling catastrophe
Scientists using ice-breaking ships and underwater robots have found the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting at an accelerating rate and could be on an irreversible path to collapse, spelling catastrophe for global sea level rise.
Since 2018, a team of scientists forming the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, has been studying Thwaites — often dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier” — up close to better understand how and when it might collapse.
Their findings, set out across a collection of studies, provide the clearest picture yet of this complex, ever-changing glacier. The outlook is “grim,” the scientists said in a report published Thursday, revealing the key conclusions of their six years of research.
Because sea level rise. Much sea level rise.
The scientists predict the whole of Thwaites and the Antarctic Ice Sheet behind it could be gone in the 23rd Century. Even if humans stop burning fossil fuels rapidly — which is not happening — it may be too late to save it.
It’s so not happening. What humans are doing instead is enthusiastically burning more and more and more fossil fuels, as fast as they can, before something stops them.
I live in rural South Australia, surrounded by vineyards, citrus and avocado orchards, cereal cropping and potato patches. An early warm flush in the last weeks of winter brought on early budding of vines. Then, three days ago, severe frost burned off much of the new buds, leaving vignerons uncertain about this season’s crop.
Cereal farmers are short of rain, winter far drier than the norm, and many have had to dry sow in the hopes late rain will produce a crop.
And still they vote for the party that once stood for farmers, but now is keener on appeasing miners and polluters. So keen on appeasing miners, they will support any miner over any farmer when it comes to access to farmland for minerals.
They can see their crops failing, they can measure the lack of rainfall, but they don’t seem capable of joining the dots and voting for their future instead of their past.