Thank you for this excellent explanation. I’m working on a book for young readers about climate and migration and your articles give me the courage to tackle the huge, difficult topics I’m trying to pin down.
You explain these things so lucidly and so beautifully:
"This study challenges the idea that sea-level rise will be gradual or smooth. The past shows us that ice sheets can behave like flicked dominoes, tipping suddenly, with outsized consequences under warming conditions like ours."
You did a great thing for humankind by leaving the too-narrow world of academic research to talk to everyone.
Fascinating. Given the geological time frames of the study, the question remains what’s the suddenness of tipping ice-sheets? In the ocean we expect the water to get colder with depth, further from sunlight, increasing pressure, cold water denser than hot, etc.
In the Greenland Sea off Svalbard, in 1811, William Scoresby was surprised to find warm water deep beneath the surface. He had discovered remnants of Atlantic Gulf Stream water still flowing north beneath the cold fresher surface waters.
In 2007, warm Gulf Stream water surfaced in Svalbard and heat was transferred to commence the melting of glaciers on the archipelago.
About 2007, I attended a lecture by scientists that had developed the means to calculate all the energy in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean. They set out to demonstrate how greenhouse gases had retained so much energy that the ice cap had melted. They found insufficient heat in the atmosphere to do the melting. There must be an additional energy source from above. So, they said it was the albedo effect that dark Arctic waters absorb solar energy like a black vinyl car seat.
I asked which would open first, the Northeast Passage or the Northwest Passage? They conferred and one said the Northeast Passage because the East rotating Earth causes Atlantic water to bear right. He understood that warm Atlantic water was melting the ice cap with a counterclockwise circulation around the Arctic Sea.
(You may see this in NASA Arctic Sea Ice Melt 2024 animated video)
Meanwhile along the US Atlantic seaboard vegetation and soils have been removed replaced by hard impervious surfaces. Without changes in annual rainfall volumes, there has been substantial increases in stormwater runoff into the sea and a rising of sea levels.
To stop the tipping of ice sheets, let the land retain the rainwater that falls on it and stop stormwater runoff.
Thank you for this excellent explanation. I’m working on a book for young readers about climate and migration and your articles give me the courage to tackle the huge, difficult topics I’m trying to pin down.
You explain these things so lucidly and so beautifully:
"This study challenges the idea that sea-level rise will be gradual or smooth. The past shows us that ice sheets can behave like flicked dominoes, tipping suddenly, with outsized consequences under warming conditions like ours."
You did a great thing for humankind by leaving the too-narrow world of academic research to talk to everyone.
Fascinating. Given the geological time frames of the study, the question remains what’s the suddenness of tipping ice-sheets? In the ocean we expect the water to get colder with depth, further from sunlight, increasing pressure, cold water denser than hot, etc.
In the Greenland Sea off Svalbard, in 1811, William Scoresby was surprised to find warm water deep beneath the surface. He had discovered remnants of Atlantic Gulf Stream water still flowing north beneath the cold fresher surface waters.
In 2007, warm Gulf Stream water surfaced in Svalbard and heat was transferred to commence the melting of glaciers on the archipelago.
About 2007, I attended a lecture by scientists that had developed the means to calculate all the energy in the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean. They set out to demonstrate how greenhouse gases had retained so much energy that the ice cap had melted. They found insufficient heat in the atmosphere to do the melting. There must be an additional energy source from above. So, they said it was the albedo effect that dark Arctic waters absorb solar energy like a black vinyl car seat.
I asked which would open first, the Northeast Passage or the Northwest Passage? They conferred and one said the Northeast Passage because the East rotating Earth causes Atlantic water to bear right. He understood that warm Atlantic water was melting the ice cap with a counterclockwise circulation around the Arctic Sea.
(You may see this in NASA Arctic Sea Ice Melt 2024 animated video)
Meanwhile along the US Atlantic seaboard vegetation and soils have been removed replaced by hard impervious surfaces. Without changes in annual rainfall volumes, there has been substantial increases in stormwater runoff into the sea and a rising of sea levels.
To stop the tipping of ice sheets, let the land retain the rainwater that falls on it and stop stormwater runoff.