{"id":5071,"date":"2016-05-13T13:30:01","date_gmt":"2016-05-13T08:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=5071"},"modified":"2016-05-12T15:33:33","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T10:33:33","slug":"soaring-temps-in-west-antarctica-may-fuel-sea-level-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cawater-info.net\/all_about_water\/en\/?p=5071","title":{"rendered":"Soaring Temps in West Antarctica May Fuel Sea Level Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Temperatures in West Antarctica are have increased by 4.3\u00b0F over the past 50 years or so, according to a new paper released Sunday in Nature Geoscience. That increase is far more than scientists have thought, and nearly as much as the 5\u00b0F rise on the nearby Antarctic Peninsula, the fastest-warming region on Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a cause for serious concern, say the study\u2019s authors: West Antarctica holds enough fresh water to raise sea level by 11 feet if all the ice melted, and even a fraction of that amount could prove catastrophic to coastal areas where hundreds of millions of people live.<\/p>\n

\"west_antartica\"<\/a>

Credit: University of Washington<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, the 8 inches or so of sea level rise the world has experienced since 1900 is already enough to have\u00a0boosted the power of storm surges, put\u00a0pressure on infrastructure in places like South Florida\u00a0and exposed millions of Americans to the\u00a0danger of coastal flooding. The 3 feet of additional rise expected by 2100 will make all of these problems vastly worse.<\/p>\n

West Antarctica currently adds just a tenth of the current .18 inches of annual sea level rise scientists have measured. But, \u201cif this trend continues, its contribution to sea level rise, could become significant. Not today or tomorrow, but a few decades in the future,\u201d said lead author David Bromwich, of Ohio State University, in an interview.<\/p>\n

The reason Bromwich and his colleagues set out to analyze West Antarctic temperature trends is that previous studies have disagreed about what\u2019s happening in that part of the continent. That\u2019s because there are fewer than 20 weather stations in all of Antarctica, whose vast land area equals that of the continental U.S. AND Mexico, so scientists have to make educated calculations about what\u2019s happening in between.<\/p>\n

That is less of a problem on bigger, colder East Antarctica, where even a significant temperature increase wouldn\u2019t push the mercury above the freezing point. In the west, though, the ice is already somewhat unstable since much of it sits on land that\u2019s below sea level.<\/p>\n

Relatively warm ocean currents have already started eroding the ends of glaciers from below, allowing the ice to flow faster toward the sea. On the Antarctic Peninsula, meanwhile, ice shelves have abruptly collapsed, and in this case, much of the damage has come from meltwater on the surface. \u201cMelting does bad things to ice shelves,\u201d Bromwich said in an understatement.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s happening to temperatures in West Antarctica, therefore, could have a big effect on the ice, so Bromwich and his colleagues set out to do a new analysis. There is a weather station in that part of the continent, but temperatures haven\u2019t been taken consistently since the station was established in the late 1950s.<\/p>\n

To fill in the gaps, the scientists used a technique known as weather reanalysis, in which climate models predict what temperatures should have been in various places around the globe. Then the models are tested against what actual temperatures were, and refined.<\/p>\n

The result is a set of temperature reconstructions that can fill in gaps in the actual record with relatively high accuracy. \u201cIt was a big detective undertaking. We think the errors are quite small,\u201d Bromwich said.<\/p>\n

The scientists found that winter and spring temperatures rose the most over the 50-year period they studied, but summer temperatures rose as well. Most of the time, they didn\u2019t quite get above freezing, but Bromwich said, \u201cwe\u2019ve seen some years when satellites have showed extensive melting\u201d \u2014\u00a0something like the surface melting seen last summer in Greenland, where temperatures year-round have always been significantly higher than in West Antarctica.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point is that the closer you get to freezing, the more likely you are to cross that threshold,\u201d Bromwich said.<\/p>\n

And while Bromwich noted that \u201cthe Arctic has gotten a lot of attention this year,\u201d in coming years, the world\u2019s attention may be focused on the opposite end of the globe.<\/p>\n

Source: http:\/\/www.climatecentral.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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