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© Andrew
Peacock / Reuters
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Burning
all of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas could
heat up the Earth enough to melt the entirety of Antarctica, driving sea levels
catastrophically high, a new study warns.
The
Antarctic Ice Sheet, the largest ice cap on Earth, stores the equivalent of 58
meters (close to 200 feet) of water in terms of global sea level rise. Should
it all melt, cities such as New York, Tokyo and Shanghai would all be
submerged.
“Burning
the currently attainable fossil fuel resources is sufficient to eliminate the
ice sheet,” the study, published in Science Advances on
Friday, said.
The
good news is that such an event would not happen overnight. It would likely
take as much as tens of thousands of years before Antarctica became ice-free.
“This
kind of sea-level rise would be unprecedented in the history of civilization,”
Ricarda Winkelmann at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in
Germany, who led the research, told the Wall Street Journal.
The
prediction is based on simulating all possible scenarios, such as warming air
and ocean temperatures, as well as changes in ice flow and potential snowfall,
in a detailed computer Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM).
“We
examine the ice-sheet evolution over the next ten thousand years with the
Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM), taking all of these processes into account,”
the study reads.
Last
year, a separate study showed that massive regions of the ice sheet that makes up West
Antarctica has begun to collapse due to warm waters swelling up from the depths
and warming the ice sheet from below. Melting this part of the ice sheet would
raise sea levels by about four meters over the course of a few centuries.
“If
we don’t stop dumping our waste carbon dioxide into the sky, land that is now
home to more than a billion people will one day be under water,” Ken Caldeira,
a co-author at the US Carnegie Institution, said in a statement.
If
continued for 60-80 years, current rates of emissions from oil, coal, and
natural gas could make the West Antarctic ice sheet unstable, scientists said.
However, that would account for just 6-8 percent of fossil fuel reserves.
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In
recent years, global leaders have agreed to try to limit global warming to less
than 2 degrees Celsius, mainly by reducing carbon output and investing in
renewable energy sources.
“If
the 2C target … were attained, the millennial sea-level rise from Antarctica
could likely be restricted to 2 metres,” scientists wrote in the latest study.
But
in the worst-case scenario – in which all fossil fuels are burned and
temperatures rise by over 10 degrees Celsius – sea levels would rise by 30
centimeters a decade.
“Human
beings haven’t experienced anything like that before,” said Winkelmann,
according to the Guardian.
At
that pace, sea levels would rise over 30 meters by the end of this millennia
and reach over 40 meters in the next, not too far from what the whole of
Antarctica has stored now.
“Thus,
if emissions of fossil-fuel carbon result in warming substantially beyond the
2C target, millennial-scale rates of sea-level rise are likely to be dominated
by ice loss from Antarctica. With unrestrained future CO2 emissions, the amount
of sea-level rise from Antarctica could exceed tens of meters over the next
1000 years and could ultimately lead to the loss of the entire ice sheet,” the
researchers concluded.
While
these findings are just the result of a computer simulation, the consequences
the scientists looked into are possible.
“The
west Antarctic ice sheet may already have tipped into a state of unstoppable
ice loss, whether as a result of human activity or not,” said Anders Levermann,
another member of the research team at the Potsdam Institute, the Guardian
reported. “But if we want to pass on cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai,
Calcutta, Hamburg or New York as our future heritage, we need to avoid a
tipping in east Antarctica.”
Originally published in RT America
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