Antarctic Deteriorating, Oceans Could Rise 3 Feet by 2100

I posted a story recently describing an article in the academic journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. That story warned of devastating climatic consequences from a slight uptick in global temperature over the next few decades. The study didn’t give much reason for hope, but it did imply that an impossible immediate cessation of fossil fuel burning could at least cut the level of danger a little.

That was Tuesday.

[O]n Wednesday, Robert DeConto and David Pollard published a paper in the weekly science journal Nature called “Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise.” The study claims that the western Antarctic ice shelf, many thousands of miles wide, is deteriorating at such a rapid rate that the world could see an average rise in ocean levels of three feet by 2100. That rise does not take into account any other contributing factors, only the ice shelf’s collapse. The BBC:

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that, without any restrictions on carbon emissions, the seas around the world likely rise by up to 98cm by 2100.

However, the IPCC estimates contained a minimum contribution from Antarctica…..

The exact level of Antarctica’s impact on these projections has been vigorously debated. Late last year, a research paper suggested that projections of a contribution of a metre or more were not plausible.

But this new study argues that by 2100 the world could see 1.14m of sea-level rise from Antarctica alone.

[T]o really grasp the scope of this kind of change, I went to geology.com and plugged in a 1 meter rise in ocean levels for the city of New York:

As you can see, JFK Airport is effectively wiped off the map, along with most of the communities surrounding Jamaica Bay. The Long Island coast extending out of the right side of the frame is similar, with wide swaths of land erased.

I zoomed into lower Manhattan to see what that looked like.

Battery Park, Brooklyn Navy Yard: gone. That is a radically different New York City. It doesn’t even begin to consider the flooded subway tunnels and the catastrophic building collapse after being weakened by the water. Nor does it consider high tides in the bay.

[A]nd this is only New York- according to The New York Times’ Justin Gillis, the entire world is facing disaster:

The situation would grow far worse beyond 2100, the researchers found, with the rise of the sea exceeding a pace of a foot per decade by the middle of the 22nd century. Scientists had documented such rates of increase in the geologic past, when far larger ice sheets were collapsing, but most of them had long assumed it would be impossible to reach rates so extreme with the smaller ice sheets of today.

“We are not saying this is definitely going to happen,” said David Pollard, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University and a co-author of the new paper. “But I think we are pointing out that there’s a danger, and it should receive a lot more attention.”

The long-term effect would likely be to drown the world’s coastlines, including many of its great cities.

Welp.

This is my current mood:

Game over, man.