Planet at risk of heading toward “Hothouse Earth” state – “Places on Earth will become uninhabitable”

6 August 2018 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – An international team of scientists has published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that even if the carbon emission reductions called for in the Paris Agreement are met, there is a risk of Earth entering what the scientists call “Hothouse Earth” conditions.A […]

The giant iceberg that broke from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf is stuck, threatening to destabilize more of the continent’s ice

By Leah Rosenbaum 23 July 2018 (Science News) – Curl the fingers of your left hand over your palm and stick out your thumb like a hitchhiker. Now, you have a rough map of Antarctica — with the inside of your thumb playing the part of the Larsen C ice shelf, says glaciologist Ted Scambos […]

Study finds hundreds of thousands of U.S. homes at risk of chronic flooding due to sea level rise over the coming decades – “By 2100, there’s a 98–100 percent chance that we get 6 inches of sea level rise. It’s virtually guaranteed.”

(UCS) – Sea levels are rising. Tides are inching higher. High-tide floods are becoming more frequent and reaching farther inland. And hundreds of US coastal communities will soon face chronic, disruptive flooding that directly affects people’s homes, lives, and properties. Yet property values in most coastal real estate markets do not currently reflect this risk. […]

Warmer ocean water destabilizing Antarctica ice shelves from below also causing massive vertical cracks – “There are dual processes going on here: One that is destabilizing from below, and another from above.”

13 June 2018 (University of Waterloo) – A new study from the University of Waterloo discovered that rising sea levels could be accelerated by vulnerable ice shelves in the Antarctic. The study, by an international team of polar scientists led by Canada Research Chair Christine Dow of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, discovered that the process […]

Antarctica ice melt increased by more than five times since 1997-2002 period – “The detailed record shows an acceleration, starting around 2002”

By Chris Mooney 13 June 2018 (The Washington Post) – Antarctica’s ice sheet is melting at a rapidly increasing rate, now pouring more than 200 billion tons of ice into the ocean annually and raising sea levels a half-millimeter every year, a team of 80 scientists reported Wednesday. The melt rate has tripled in the […]

Antarctica ice-sheet melt increased sharply in 2012 – “The continent is causing sea levels to rise faster today than at any time in the past 25 years”

13 June 2018 (University of Leeds) – Ice losses from Antarctica have increased global sea levels by 7.6 mm since 1992, with two fifths of this rise (3 mm) coming in the last five years alone.The findings are from a major climate assessment known as the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE), and are […]

New Antarctic process contributing to sea-level rise and climate change revealed, that “may trigger a transition from a cold regime to a warm regime, characterised by high rates of melting from the base of ice shelves”

24 April 2018 (University of Tasmania) – A new Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS)-led study has revealed a previously undocumented process where melting glacial ice sheets change the ocean in a way that further accelerates the rate of ice melt and sea level rise.Led by IMAS PhD student Alessandro Silvano and published in […]

New study finds sea level rise accelerating – “This is almost certainly a conservative estimate”

By Katie Weeman and Patrick Lynch; Editing by Sara Blumberg 13 February 2018 (NASA) – Global sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades, rather than increasing steadily, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data.This acceleration, driven mainly by increased melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of Pine Island iceberg under the midnight sun

By Kathryn Hansen 19 December 2017 (NASA) – In September 2017, a new iceberg calved from Pine Island Glacier—one of the main outlets where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet flows into the ocean. Just weeks later, the berg named B-44 shattered into more than 20 fragments.On 15 December 2017, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on […]

These are the melting glaciers that might someday drown your city, according to NASA

By Chris Mooney 15 November 2017 (The Washington Post) – New York City has plenty to worry about from sea level rise. But according to a new study by NASA researchers, it should worry specifically about two major glacier systems in Greenland’s northeast and northwest — but not so much about other parts of the […]

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