I'm finding it a little hard to work today with this in my head.
Antarctic ice extent is now 6.4 standard deviations below the mean. That is, I'm reliably told, a one in 13 billion year event.
We're about to see a lot of shit hit a lot of fans. And we are far from ready.
Business as usual is over. Politics as usual is over. We need to be putting our effort into building systems that can help us survive what greed and power and wilful blindness have wrought.
I often say that Antarctica is really big - and one of the reasons that it's quite hard to work out what is going on is the sheer size as well as lack of observations.
We would not expect the same weather and climate across the US, and #Antarctica is almost 1.5 times bigger than the USA...
"For too long, too few have worried about Earth’s remotest continent and its largest refrigerator, while attention focused on the fires that burned, literally and figuratively, on more populated shores. Antarctica was variously portrayed as an explorer’s playground, a utopian land of scientific co-operation or a poster child for environmental protectionism. The exceptionalism is misguided"
“The winds will change the ocean, the ocean will melt #Antarctica—and the water is coming to visit you.” If the #ThwaitesGlacier collapses, it could bring much of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet with it and raise sea levels by over three meters. The potential collapse of Thwaites is among the largest environmental threats to global civilization—and we’ve barely begun to understand it. What took us so long?
The Antarctic sea ice extent rubber band has snapped.
Via Professor Eliot Jacobson on Twitter :
“It finally happened, breaking 5 sigma, the same statistical threshold physicists used to prove the existence of the Higgs boson.
“At 2,700,000 km² below the 1991-2020 mean, Antarctic sea ice extent was 5.14σ below the mean, roughly a 1-in-7,400,000 chance.”
In case you haven't yet had your daily dose of climate $&!*: "Reduction in sea ice in Antarctica has resulted in the deaths of an estimated 10,000 emperor penguin chicks [in 2022].
"In 2022, satellites recorded a colony of emperor penguins disappearing into the Bellingshausen Sea as the ice they were living on melted away.
"The chicks had not fully developed waterproof feathers and they most likely froze to death."
The ferry I am currently on has just passed the #PenguinsFPSO a floating storage and production operations vessel that, #Shell assures us here, "is an attractive opportunity with a competitive forward looking price".
The record low #SeaIce situation around #Antarctica has taken a lot of the attention this year, but #Greenland also had a #StrangeIce year - smashing monthly mean temperature records in July and again in August - right at the top of the ice sheet at #SummitStation
In the mean time it's the 27th year in a row that @greenlandicesheet has net lost ice.
“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.”
“Many of the ice shelves have deteriorated a lot: 48 lost more than 30% of their initial mass over just 25 years. This is further evidence that #Antarctica is changing because the climate is warming.”
Front of the Ross Ice Shelf - its nigh on impossible to do something around 800 km long justice in a photo... what's more incomprehensible is there a cavity beneath this which stretches back 800 km. And these are only now starting to feature in climate models. #Antarctica#Climate#IceShelves
Scientists are now reporting on the "greening" of Antarctica. And that's NOT a good thing...
As Antarctica is mostly covered in ice and snow, there previously hasn't been much space left for plants to grow. There are no trees or shrubs, and the plants that do exist are limited to a few islands and along the western Antarctic Peninsula.
However, as global temperatures continue to rise and ice in Antarctica continues to melt, researchers have found that plants on the continent are growing more quickly.
Comparing the results with surveys from the previous 50 years, they found that the sites had not only become more densely populated by the plants, but that they had also grown faster each year as the climate got warmer.
The results were staggering, with the Antarctic hair grass growing as much in 2009-2019 as it had in the entire 50 years from 1960 from 2009.
The Antarctic pearlwort moved even faster, growing five times more in the same periods.
Peter Convey, at the British Antarctic Survey, touched on the impact of accelerated growth as he told New Scientist: “The most novel feature of this is not the idea that something is growing faster. It’s that we think we’re starting to see what is almost like a step change or a tipping point.”
You and I no longer live in the natural world into which we were born. It's already very different, and the pace of change is accelerating.
I reblogged my part of videnskab.dk's series on #TippingPoints. I was interviewed on #Antarctica in the #Climate system, why the #SeaIce is so low, what are the consequences for the #IceSheet and how our @OceanIceEU project will help to fill the gaps.
More from the research voyage: these puppies grew on our gear that had spent a year at 2km depth in the oceans - Anthoathecata (thecate hydroids) - I'm told. Dunno why people focus on aliens from other planets when these folks are pootling around in the depths #oceanography#Antarctica This is them in water - image about 5 cm across.
Currently sailing around the Southern Ocean on a fishing boat for @OceanIceEU - it wouldn't necessarily be my choice but Povl Abrahamson is doing it for #Science (deploying some instruments to measure changes in #antarctica and posting some spectacular photos on his #Flickr channel
April 25 is #WorldPenguinDay so enjoy some Adélie penguins! ⠀
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This handsome couple, two Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae), common to all the Antarctic coasts, are hand printed in black ink with a hint of orange on white Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper. Each print is 12.5” x 9.25” (31.8 cm x 23.5cm). Adélie penguins are the most widely spread and southernly penguins (along with the Emperor penguins).⠀
⠀ #linocut#AdéliePenguin#printmaking#Antarctica#reliefPrint#printmaker#MastoArt
The sun finally came out... we are at 74S in about 600 m of water measuring the cold, salty oxygen-rich water draining north to replenish the global ocean. A process that seems to be changing. #climate#Oceanography#Antarctica