A huge crack is spreading across one of Antarctica’s biggest ice shelves
thestar.com> "I have spent so much time now looking at the satellite images, and I really love this ice shelf, it would be such a tragic thing to see this thing go."
Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. We humans can fall in love with large chunks of ice just by looking at them long enough. How will we ever bring ourselves to terraform another planet?
Bringing ourselves to terraform another planet will be very easy -- the one who pushes the button will be one who hasn't looked at the planet long enough to be attached to it.
Sounds a bit like the death penalty.
Isn't it already common knowledge that Mars cant be terraformed? No magnetosphere, cold core too iirc (and thats related to the moons being tidally locked.
Oh my! I'd say that judgement is a bit premature.
We are talking about a planet-scale engineering project; something that is millions of times the scale of anything that has been attempted.
We have only d 13 landing on it, and only something 70 space craft have travelled to Mars or beyond[1].
We have only just found traces of water there, and who knows what else is available (or not).
We have never even attempted to terraform anything, and the closest we've come has been maybe things like desert control programs.
And yet it is supposed to be common knowledge that "it can't be done"? Sure, that is likely to be true, but the idea that we already know the specific things that will stop us seems unlikely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes
Don't mistake me.
I love the idea of terraforming Mars, to the point of spending a lot of time understanding the challenges to achieving success.
Conceptually there is always tech which we are yet to discover, but that just pushes the conversation into hand wavy territory, and discussing the details is always more fun.
The simplest plans are to start a runaway green house effect, in order to warm the planet up.
That alone requires signficant but potentially achievable feats of engineering.
But as I remember, the unsolved issue remains in maintaining a stable atmosphere, one which isnt sheared away by solar wind.
This is why the tidal locking issue is the problem. The core is solid on Mars, and the idea of spinning up a planet to rotate puts us beyond space elevator tech and nearing solar engineering levels of ambition.
As someone else suggested, there's the idea of having a super conducting magnet on the equator to create the field.
That's still below solar engineering, but a feat of such magnitude that underground habs win out as an option for the foreseeable future.
> But as I remember, the unsolved issue remains in maintaining a stable atmosphere, one which isnt sheared away by solar wind.
Yeah, any atmosphere you give Mars will evaporate over some millions of years.
The obvious workaround is to regenerate it at the same rate. Much like a tire you need to reinflate it now and then.
Humanity will also probably figure out some better tech during the next million years, but even if not, this should work.
> The simplest plans are to start a runaway green house effect, in order to warm the planet up.
Hey, something we are already good at!
To add some substance to this comment, why wouldnt we just try to terraform earth first?
It was speculated that it is possible to create magnetosphere, by creating giant magnet :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Protectin...
I am chagrined by the impoverishment of my imagination.
Thanks, in more ways than one.
Hear-say: although the magnetosphere is a problem, it's supposedly possible to out-pace it because the original atmosphere loss occurred over millions/billions of years.
Let's see how terraforming this one works out before we go off terraforming another.
You don't experiment on your production planet.
Mars could be a decent staging planet!
We will probably end up pushing changes to Prod then when everything goes wrong realise we were not testing apples with apples, and then it's too late cause nobody took a backup because we were so sure there would be no issues.
it's ok, we're doing agile terraforming!
In software, the testing environment usually isn't more expensive by several orders of magnitude.
Testing in the emulator is way slower, as is testing with all my conditional breakpoints in place, as is testing with all debug assertions enabled. Devkits are often more expensive than retail kits by a significant margin.
Terra-deforming?
Might be better to terraform an already messed up planet before our own. (which is arguably somewhat messed up, but not Mars-level. Yet)
I think the parent's point is that we are already currently terraforming our planet, whether or not we would like to admit it.
Why is it so important that we terraform other planets? Is it really a desirable thing to spread across the solar system and beyond like mold on stale bread?
Well, it’s important to the mold.
Gasp!
Could we be... just a means for mold to spread across the universe?
It is important because we have the power to wipe out all life on this planet. We need to spread further than our destructive power or face the end of our species.
If you are happy for the end of the species, then that's fine.
If we can terraform Mars, maybe we can revert the terraforming that we have been doing on Earth (without risking the species on our first attempt at corrective terraforming).
Well, it's too damn crowded on this planet.
I'm currently in Antarctica, the giant cold dead place, and I can assure you that being crowded is one thing we do not suffer from.
I really loved that plotline and the thought experiment around the ethics of changing a place, even a place without life.
Arguably the entire Mars trilogy is a romance between the original Green, Sax Russel, and the original Red, Ann Clayborne.
I doubt it's a passing fascination with featureless ice, but more of a dread of the things to come...
The article specifically distinguishes it from the concern about sea level. I think it's about the attachment to something you've studied and the desire to preserve it.
It also reminded me of the Mars trilogy, but because the separation of a major Antarctic ice shelf and the resulting mass flooding on Earth was the trigger for the second revolt on Mars.
The article reminds me of the part in the trilogy where a huge chunk of Antarctica breaks off and sea levels rise by meters in weeks.
"Its its got to be us or them, its going to be them." --The Humans
The Mars environmentalists will be one of the stupidest interest groups in human history. And they will certainly exist.
There hasn't been very good news from the Antartic lately.
After seeing the reception Brian Cox received lately by Australian senator Malcom Roberts on an episode of QanA it's pretty clear we have no hope in world leaders doing anything significant about it. There is way too much self-interest and sociopathic behaviour going on by the majority within these circles of governance and "power".
Too many of us are waiting for the UN to just fix this issue; however, we've relied on the UN and it's narratives of change for too long and the truth is, we the masses need to change our own behaviour, it's our responsibility, somewhere we lost our way. I know there are good people working in these organisations and others like it, doing really good things, there just isn't enough of them or they're not having a big enough impact.
It seems pretty clear that democratic governance has severely failed us on this issue and many others in recent years, and as a society I think we need to try to understand why and correct it. Democracy is obviously not a bad idea, but in most western countries, the current configuration seems to be problematic and corrupt. It's not sustainable.
I have a strong feeling it's now too little to late and the only hope now is to take matters into our own hands by ignoring what democratically elected "leaders" are telling us they're doing and start doing it, get our own hands dirty. Divest, install solar panels (decentralisation of power production is important), consume, travel, eat thoughtfully, don't have so many kids etc.
By the look of it, the only way to make it through the madness ahead will be kindness and compassion for the earth, all living things and each other . If not, mother nature will each us a very harsh lesson, I think she is already starting to balance the books.
Unfortunately this storm is not just going to blow over, it would be nice if it would, but it's not going to.
> decentralisation of power production is important
Why?
Because it means there can then be no single monopoly on electricity generation, nor are people forced into consuming power which is being generated in a way that does not align with their core values.
This was the situation in Australia until fairly recently, people wanted alternatives but there wasn't any renewable options, then when the Government changed and pulled rebates for new solar installations, it was even more unthinkable for people to get started.
Also, I'm not arguing for complete and utter decentralization, but there needs to be options.
From the article, regarding sea level rise:
When ice shelves lose large chunks, it does not raise sea level because these
bodies are already afloat. However, the loss of an ice shelf can speed up the
seaward flow of the nonfloating glacial ice behind it, and this ice can in turn
contribute to sea-level rise. Researchers have estimated that the loss of all
the ice that the Larsen C ice shelf currently holds back would raise global
sea levels by 10 centimetres.The faster that levels rise the sooner we are to get off our collective asses and make a difference.
You seem to have stumbled upon my favorite climate change joke:
They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!
True, but the longer we have to sit on our asses, the more likely we are to succeed in our effort to make a difference when we finally get around to it (due to technological progression).
I wouldn't count on this - markets don't seem to care about sea level rise at the moment
Reinsurance is definitely concerned about sea level rise. Here is an example presentation from SwissRe showing their estimates of the increasing damages due to climate change (e.g., slide 7).
http://www.miamidade.gov/planning/library/presentations/2014...
Good point. Intuitively I think markets would attempt to approximate probability * cost i.e. expected cost. However there is something intensely wrong how market is functioning with environmental issue. It appears that markets is trying to view the expected cost as debt that needs to be paid in future. The value of debt would be much larger in future but markets seems to be ok with current return. This could be a great theoretical hole in efficient markets theory.
The wealthy do love their ocean-view properties, though.
The wealthy can afford to move their properties back/up a few feet.
You realize poor nations will get fucked over disproportionately, right?
Why? They don't have anything to destroy anyway.
... Make a difference for the generation after the next. Maybe.
Does anyone know where I can find estimations of sea level rise over the next 10 to 200 years?
I always hear horror stories of 20 meter rises but don't know what the ranges of "consensus" are...
Seems likely that the "Bathtub Model" we have in our heads is all wrong, and sea-level change is going to be highly variable in different parts of the planet. Go and watch one of Jerry Mitrovica's videos[1] to get a good idea... According to his models, some places will likely see sea-levels fall by as much as (iirc) 25m, to others where sea-levels will rise by 5 to 8m by the end of this century. Goodbye ports, goodbye containerised shipping, goodbye global trade.
Thanks. He isn't actually saying these numbers (-25 m, 8m) are expected in 2100, he's stating that the peak higher sea level in the older but comparable times (that is during https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eemian around 115 kyears ago) was up to 7 meter higher on the extreme points. Which is a good illustration that the "bathtub mental model" is false. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is much more constrained to cite that, they present the following (the 2013 results):
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Cha...
The worst projected total average increase at 2100 is around 40 cm if we do some corrections in our fossil fuels use and around 80 cm (on average) if we don't (so called "business as usual", they technically call it "RCP8.5" (1)). The local increases (which we now know can be significantly different) are drawn with the scale up to around 1 m for the "some corrections scenarios" if I understood. But it will go up afterwards for hundreds of years, and it can't be stopped.
Mitrovica believes these are too conservative as even the current measurements already hit the upper bounds. It seems anyway the world is more or less behaving in the "business as usual" sense regarding the fossil fuels.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... It's worth always looking at the RCP8.5, as that's what's going to happen if no significant changes happen. It's not "the most improbable" but "the most probable if nothing changes" and I admit I personally tend to see the graph with more paths as "OK this one is the highest, it's extreme" when it's the default one!
The Wikipedia page is not a bad place to start. It links to a quite a few external resources in the Projections section.
I'd also like to see estimates from the 1990s of how much sea level rise we can expect by 2016.
I seem to remember reading a book back in the day that said New York City would be completely underwater by 2010.
The IPCC 2nd report came out in 1995. They mention "...a rise in sea level of 30 cm to 1 m by the year 2100."
Seems a bit conservative given current sea level rise, but I suppose they have to go with something that everyone will agree to.
Back in the day I read a book that told the story of how a boy discovered that the old vagabond who skulked about his farm was actually the mighty Belgarath the Sorcerer.
If we took a fleet of tug-boats and towed this ice to the Middle East, I wonder how long the fresh water would last?
An interesting theoretical thought exercise.
The money and fuel bill for tugboats sufficient to move that would probably be better spent on massive fields of photovoltaics and electricity-intensive seawater desalination equipment...
What if this frozen ice contains disease vectors still dormant and if we don't have immunity to them they might wipe out all life on earth.
What about nuclear powered boats? Russia has a fleet of nuclear powered ice breakers.
6000 square kilometers of ice.
Take smaller chunks of it.
How small to become profitable? You'll see, this ends in a no win situation fast. Sadly enough.
Build giant sails!
Or -- while we're thinking geoengineering -- could we limit how much ice breaks off by deliberately making a cut (or a series of breaks in the ice) from the current end of the crack straight out to sea?
If that would work, then there wouldn't be a crack there in the first place.
Why?
Because the crack isn't the fundamental problem. The problem is that the ice sheet is too small to resist temperature changes. Purposefully making the ice sheet smaller yet only exacerbates the problem.
The only reason anyone cares that there is a crack is because it implies that the ice is shrinking.
Why does a bigger span of ice make it more resistant to temperature changes?
Lower surface area and higher albedo.
Why does albedo increase the larger the shell is? I would have thought it'd only depend on whether the surface was in the form of snow or ice.
And wouldn't a larger shell expose a bigger surface area?
"If we took a fleet of tug-boats and towed this ice to the Middle East,"
Not easy. This was a problem my high school math tutor, a glaciologist [0],[1] discussed with me one evening doing some applied math.
From memory, using a tug to pull an iceberg from Antartica to the Australian mainland would be difficult because of the forces involved. As the tug would try to pull the iceberg, the iceberg itself is acted on by other forces (gravity, currents). The tug pulling the iceberg, connected by a cable would be acted on by the forces applied by the iceberg resulting in the berg and tug rotating in circles around each other. [2] Adding another tug has similar problems.
The idea isn't stupid, it's just the physics get in the way of achieving a result.
[0] 1970 - 2003 http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2003/antarctic-ice-man-and...
[1] 2003 - 2016 https://rmdb.research.utas.edu.au/public/rmdb/q/indiv_detail...
[2] If memory serves me, Jo used 'moments of inertia' to describe this problem ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
There are not enough boats in the world to move this object. It's gonna go where it wants.
Can someone say "trading spaces" qoute
350 meters thick? Global warming or not, how could it possibly get that thick without cracking sooner is surprising to me.
When it gives way, might there be a surge-wave that causes trouble when it hits land elsewhere?
It's worth noting that the title of the article is somewhat misleading. The ice shelf entirely is slightly smaller than Scotland, but the part breaking off is (upper estimate) 12% of that, so, according to the article, slightly larger than Prince Edward Island.
Not that this is reason to celebrate or think that this is any more than a continuation of the ongoing and forthcoming climate excursion.
Thank God it's only a motion picture! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_in_the_World
Another scary recent article: "A business-as-usual approach by humanity makes 2035 a plausible moment for the permafrost to melt and methane to escape."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/21/farewell-to-ic...
If you're ready to do something about this, consider volunteering for http://brandnewcongress.org
I think that is the longest distance between cause and effect I have ever seen seriously suggested on this forum.
This just does not seem feasible. I think a better use of time and energy would be spent at the Citizen's Climate Lobby: http://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/
Alternatively: Use public transit, encourage friends and family not to be wasteful, invest in alternative fuel sources, vote for people who will use taxpayer dollars to invest in alternative fuel sources, so on and so forth.
What is anybody else going to do that you can't do yourself already?
While personal effort is laudable, and your kind of thinking is neccessary, it will not change things.
The decisions that can actually change something are made on government level and depend on believes ingrained into culture / society.
A nice example is Israel and it's shortage of water. There, children are educated from very early on (kingergarden) to be careful with and conserve water wherever possible. It's a common and accepted fact that they have little water and must preserve it.
But changing this kind of thinking for something way less observable and direct, such as global warming, is harder. And needs a unified effort by government, education and media. And takes decades.
Personal effort by itself can only achieve marginal changes, but political action without personal example will achieve nothing.
Politicians are not stupid. If the environmentalist grass roots do not believe in their cause badly enough to go and change their personal lives first, they will only receive token efforts and empty promisses. And that's because the politicians do (correctly, IMHO) assume than environmentalist only want to wash away their guilt, not achieve actual changes. As in, changes that will negatively affect their personal lives.
Of course, what environmentalist say they want is to have politicians affect everybody's lives... but in practical terms, that means to affect primarily the lives of those that are underrepresented in the political arena. Everybody else is going to push back when real cost come upfront. And since this is the same people that has been thrown under the bus by every other class and group of interest during the last few decades, they cannot be made to pay the cost.
And, more important, for the needed changes to be embraced by enough people to matter, you need a narrative that let them believe they are achieving something of value. That cannot be done with propaganda alone. They need examplars, people who have done what it takes to effect a change in their own lives, who have paid the personal costs, and who are not deprived and miserable because of it, but actually happy and even successful.
PS: of course change can also happen bottom up, if the people feel strongly enough about it.
But that's usually only the case for things that can be felt, witnessed and judged more directly.
I like how this just isn't even coming to several states.
The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometres in length
between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider — by
2015, yawning some 200 meters in length.
I don't see any confusion there. The "length" of the crack is its long dimension, from end to end, and the "width" is how far the two sides have spread away from each another.
>> I don't see any confusion there.
"And as it grew, also became wider — by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in length."
They use "wider" and "length" to describe the same 200 meter span.
no, they use length to describe the measurement of the crack's width. totally valid afaic.
The statement is ambiguous, so it can still be valid. However the use of "length" twice in the same sentence to describe both the dimensions parallel and perpendicular to the crack is likely to confuse some readers. Some people's brains are not going to free the "length" pointer halfway through the sentence.
You can't just use "length" to describe a width. It's grammatically valid but semantically incorrect. An object can't be "100m long by 100m long".
but that's not how it's being used. what length of rope does it take to go around a quarter mile track? there's no ambiguity even though the track has length and width. the dimension in question was specified already, the width of the crack, so referring to the measure of that as its length is fine, no ambiguity.
Your sentence is dramatically better than theirs because you're referring to the length dimension of the rope and the track. "What length of rope does it take to go around a quarter-mile wide track?" <- using the author's mistake in your sentence. There's not enough information in the sentence to answer correctly.
The correct word for a measurement of wideness is width.
Length [NOUN]: 1. the longest extent of anything as measured from end to end: the length of a river. 2. the measure of the greatest dimension of a plane or solid figure.
It's pretty unambiguously wrong. You can back into what the author meant without ambiguity, but that doesn't mean the author used the correct word.
Valid? Yes. Ugly to read? Also yes.
Not pedantic. I noticed the same problem.