As Antarctica melts, we stand to lose much more than ice
Antarctica is disappearing.
A grim new report found we’re now losing 1.2 trillion tons of ice each year from the southernmost continent — an increase of 60% over the last two decades. And as glaciers and ice sheets linger in increasingly warm waters, this acceleration is unlikely to stop.
Already, the melting of West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier — which alone can raise sea level by 1.6 feet — is speeding up. Meanwhile, the world’s largest iceberg just broke off of Antartica.
We’re in control of how we combat this melt but because of the complicated nature of sea level rise, climate tipping points, and warming already locked in, a lot of what happens next is still up in the air.
“The most unpredictable thing is human behavior, I think,” Aslak Grinsted, lead author of a new study on sea level rise, told Mongabay. “And then secondly what will happen to Antarctica.”
Antarctica holds so much water, that if it were to melt, sea levels would rise 70 feet. That won’t happen, but if we keep spewing greenhouse gases into the environment, unprecedented amounts of water will end up in the sea, as ice sheets fall apart.
But a lot more is at stake than just rising sea levels. Antarctica is one of the few pristine areas untouched by human activities for thousands of years, what marine biologist James McClintock calls “an equally wondrous and mysterious landscape.”
The continent is home to a treasure trove of biodiversity: from emperor penguins to king crabs to zooplankton, which tie the entire food chain together. Certain unstudied organisms also live exclusively around Antarctica — organisms with chemicals that, if properly studied, could be the key to developing cures to cancer, as well as fighting future viruses. All this is under threat as water warms and sea ice vanishes.
But there’s reason for hope. To mark World Oceans Day this month, National Geographic officially recognized the Southern Ocean as the Planet’s fifth ocean. This can draw more attention to the plight of the water surrounding Antarctica, which is warming three to 10 times faster than previously thought.
Much of this warming may be locked in, but that’s not a reason to give up. If countries follow through on recent climate pledges, we can still limit future melt and the rising sea levels that come with it.
New research finds that if the Planet warms 4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, for example, more than a third of Antarctic ice shelves could collapse. On the other hand, limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees rather than 4 degrees would halve the area at risk and could prevent significant sea-level rise.
Avoiding every fraction of a degree of warming will spare us worst-case scenarios in the Antarctic — and perhaps preserve one of the few untouched landscapes we still have.
