The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is stable and safe, for now
Last week I talked about how we could be looking at a disaster of Biblical proportions (think Noah) if some of the major ice sheets melted, now comes word that the largest of the world’s ice sheets, the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, is safe for the time being:
While studies of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets show they are both at risk from global warming, the East Antarctic ice sheet will “need quite a bit of warming” to be affected, Andrew Mackintosh, a senior lecturer at Victoria University, said Wednesday.
The air over the East Antarctic ice sheet, an ice mass more than 1,875 miles across and up to 2.5 miles thick centered on the South Pole, will remain cold enough to prevent significant melting in the near future, the New Zealand-led research shows.
But it eventually may become vulnerable to the effects of rising sea levels driven by the melting of other ice sheets, Mackintosh’s team found. Their research was published this week in the journal Geology. Source: Wired News - AP News
This news doesn’t get us off the hook, but at least a huge wave covering most of the coastal cities of the world isn’t looming on the near-term horizon.