‘‘Do we want to take the risk to see five, six, seven meters of sea-level rise? ‘‘Most of the time, positive feedback is good,’’ he told the class. Several times he said to me: ‘‘We are teasing a giant here.’’ Twice, he declared: ‘‘We have blown the fuse.’’ What drives his work is quantifying the potential of a worst-case scenario. Or do we want to say: No, we don’t want to go there. Will it crumble slow?’’ So far, Alley says, we can’t be sure. Its recent destabilization, they note, ‘‘will increase sea-level rise from the Greenland ice sheet for decades to come.’’Describing the tendency among scientists to avoid speaking bluntly about ice-sheet collapse, Rignot told me: ‘‘You can fiddle around and say, ‘It’s going to take a long time’ or ‘We don’t know.’ But even the most conservative people in our community will tell you: ‘We warm the climate by two or three degrees C? Here is what I conclude about the station placement: Maniitsoq airport is a recent development in the history of the area, it has been settled for almost 4000 years. As of July 31, the Bangladesh Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre reported water levels along the Jamuna River were at or above “danger level.” Almost a million homes were inundated, and more than 1,500 square kilometers (600 square miles) of farmland were damaged across the country. It is wise to balance Rignot’s conclusions against Joughin’s.
The warmth leads to repeating loops of cause and effect that can force ice sheets to flow faster, break faster, melt faster.
For instance, she told me, if we compare today to earth’s last warm period — one that occurred about 120,000 years ago — ‘‘we do know the poles were at least a few degrees warmer.’’ Earth isn’t quite at that point, but projections for the Arctic regions suggest that it will be that warm in a few decades. He has four children, which he often says influences his longer-term thinking.
Irvine, Rignot has assumed an outsize profile among this peer group, thanks to his scientific ingenuity and his personal audacity. But the journal Science published the research in 1998. Tom Wagner, the NASA administrator for polar programs who helps fund the work of both men, as well as that of dozens of other American scientists, told me: ‘‘These are very intelligent people.
In late July, James Hansen, a scientist whose testimony before Congress in the 1980s called national attention to global warming, declared in a paper that sea-level changes driven by ice-sheet collapses could well exceed six feet within 50 to 150 years.
These false-color images, acquired with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, use a combination of infrared and visible light (bands 7-2-1) to make it easier to see the boundary between water and land. You ask, Will the ice shelf break off a lot or a little bit?
When the iceberg had finally broken off from the end of the flowing glacier, it had most likely released an explosive power equivalent to several atomic bombs.Every 11 days or so for the past five years, Joughin has tracked Jakobshavn’s movement — usually through radar images taken by German satellites that he views on his work computer in Seattle. At the same time, by bending down near a small creek, carved into translucent white ice by a rushing stream, I could cup my hands and drink meltwater from snow that fell thousands of years ago, water as cold and pure as any that exists in nature. Ice boulders left behind under the Russell Glacier, after a flood caused by the overflowing of a lake, east of the town of Kangerlussuaq on September 01, 2007 Greenland. The region provides significant habitat for water birds and has been classified by the Australian government as an Important Bird Area. The puzzle to solve then becomes: What produces that rise in sea level? The weather station is surrounded by the airport runway and tarmac, which is unnatural ground cover. Ice and rock, ice and rock, ice and rock: You could easily let yourself believe that humans had made no appreciable impact here at all.As we flew above the ice, the data on the sheet’s thickness (measured by radar) and precise height (from an instrument called a laser altimeter) flowed into the IceBridge computer banks.
‘‘But the world doesn’t end in 2100, either,’’ Rignot says.
The Barcoo and Thomson rivers flow southwest and converge north of the town of Windorah to form Cooper Creek, a major river system that flows toward Lake Yamma Yamma and Lake Eyre (both outside this frame). And that, in turn, would lead to a more complete collapse of that part of the ice sheet, producing an additional 12 feet of sea-level rise.
Rignot’s views on sea-level rise qualify him as a maximalist. It is a stroke of terrible cosmic luck that both glaciers are sitting on a ridge of land below sea level, making them potentially unstable.As far back as 1997, Rignot was examining satellite images that convinced him that Pine Island was pulling back from its unstable perch and beginning a rapid retreat. In our conversations, there was a running theme, a trope, of economic havoc, of drowned cities, of time running out.
Rignot isn’t certain that this is our destiny; large sea-level rises in the past can differ from today in terms of location and the forces acting upon the ice sheets. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century.
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