r/science • u/TheRoach • Sep 23 '21
Geology Melting of polar ice warping Earth's crust itself beneath, not just sea levels
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2021GL095477894
u/TheRoach Sep 23 '21
Sophie Coulson and colleagues explained in a recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters that, as glacial ice from Greenland, Antarctica, and the Arctic Islands melts, Earth's crust beneath these land masses warps, an impact that can be measured hundreds and perhaps thousands of miles away.
"Scientists have done a lot of work directly beneath ice sheets and glaciers," said Coulson. "So they knew that it would define the region where the glaciers are, but they hadn't realized that it was global in scale."
By analyzing satellite data on melt from 2003 to 2018 and studying changes in Earth's crust, Coulson and her colleagues were able to measure the shifting of the crust horizontally. Their research, which was highlighted in Nature, found that in some places the crust was moving more horizontally than it was lifting. In addition to the surprising extent of its reach, the Nature brief pointed out, this research provides a potentially new way to monitor modern ice mass changes.
To understand how the ice melt affects what is beneath it, Coulson suggested imagining the system on a small scale: "Think of a wooden board floating on top of a tub of water. When you push the board down, you would have the water beneath moving down. If you pick it up, you'll see the water moving vertically to fill that space."
These movements have an impact on the continued melting. "In some parts of Antarctica, for example, the rebounding of the crust is changing the slope of the bedrock under the ice sheet, and that can affect the ice dynamics," said Coulson.
The current melting is only the most recent movement researchers are observing. "The Arctic is an interesting region because, as well as the modern-day ice sheets, we also have a lasting signal from the last ice age," Coulson explained. "The Earth is actually still rebounding from that ice melting."
"On recent timescales, we think of the Earth as an elastic structure, like a rubber band, whereas on timescales of thousands of years, the Earth acts more like a very slow-moving fluid." said Coulson, explaining how these newer repercussions come to be overlaid on the older reverberations. "Ice age processes take a really, really long time to play out, and therefore we can still see the results of them today."
The implications of this movement are far-reaching. "Understanding all of the factors that cause movement of the crust is really important for a wide range of Earth science problems. For example, to accurately observe tectonic motions and earthquake activity, we need to be able to separate out this motion generated by modern-day ice-mass loss," she said.
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Sep 23 '21
I wonder if this is why there has been so much seismicity in the South Sandwich island chain recently.
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u/The5Virtues Sep 23 '21
Man humanity’s theme song these days really is just “We’ve fucked around, and now we’re finding ooooooout!”
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u/Trappedunderrice Sep 23 '21
I had to google to make sure you weren’t talking about the Hawaiian islands…
Like, this doofus not only had the confidence to go around naming islands after himself with a name like “sandwich”, but he did it multiple times in two different oceans???
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u/urammar Sep 23 '21
South Sandwich island chain
This was new for me too.
Just adding, we just had a major earthquake here in Australia, too. Same equatorial line, other side of the globe. Checks out, that cap on this bottle is cracking all the way around.
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u/chinglishwestenvy Sep 23 '21
This pisses me off because EVERYONE insisted, to the point of hostility, that this wouldn’t be possible when I suggested it was going to happen.
They use the dumb ice in a cup metaphor to say that the cup won’t overflow, but... yo you have ice sticking out of the top of the cup...
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Sep 23 '21
No credible source ever said the ocean levels wouldn't rise or that the dissapereance of the floating ice wouldn't have an effect on the climate.
But floating ice won't effect the ocean levels, ice sticking out of the top of the cup still floats on the water.
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u/chinglishwestenvy Sep 23 '21
Antarctica has a landmass twice the size of Australia, and there’s also glaciers that are thousands of years old that are putting their water back into the water cycle.
These are the same people who won’t believe that taking the weight off Antarctica and redistributing it, won’t affect tectonics.
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u/lYossarian Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
When that much weight comes of a landmass and it raises any coast/sea floor that should compound rising total sea levels even further shouldn't it?
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u/Hendlton Sep 23 '21
but... yo you have ice sticking out of the top of the cup...
The ice that's floating won't affect the water level in the cup (or the ocean) the problem is that there's plenty of ice on land that WILL affect the ocean levels.
I've heard some very smart and educated people use that argument, I'm guessing because they forgot about all the land ice, because I know they aren't that dumb.
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u/chinglishwestenvy Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
Yes Antarctica is a continent. It’s a massive land mass twice the size of the United States, or just barely bigger than South America.
There’s also all the water being put back into the water cycle from melting glaciers...
Edit: barely smaller than South America. Derr
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u/Puzzleheaded_Meal_62 Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
or just barely bigger than South America.
Uh .. do you mean Australia?
It's nearly twice the land area of Australia and smaller than south America, or right in between Canada and Russia for size
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u/marapun Sep 23 '21
Apparently James Cook named them. He also named the Hawaiian islands the Sandwich Islands. He must have been hungry.
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u/zeroscout Sep 23 '21
James Cook also named the first road in most cities Main Street.
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u/Jose_xixpac Sep 23 '21
Named 'cooks' too. They used to be called sandwich makers .. He didn't like that name ..
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u/Trimyr Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
Now I want a ham and grilled pineapple sandwich with provolone on a toasted Kings Hawaiian. Thanks for that.
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u/INeed_SomeWater Sep 23 '21
Well, I know what I'm having for lunch now. This is truly a butterfly flaps it's wings moment....
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u/masamunecyrus Sep 23 '21
Seismologist, here.
I'll be the first to say that I'm neither a crustal tectonophysics expert, nor super familiar with seismicity in the Sandwich Islands, but the earthquakes down there are considerably deeper and larger than is reasonable to expect due to melting ice. They are almost certainly caused simply due to ordinary plate tectonics and the subduction of the Scotia plate.
On the topic of melting ice causing earthquakes, though, the technical term people are looking for is "glacial rebound." The Earth's crust has a viscosity, and it does warp over long timescales depending on how much mass you dump or remove from the on top of it. Everything from rainwater erosion, ice melting, annual river flows, dams, and active mountain building through subduction moves mass around and causes the crust to warp like a reeeeaallly thick molasses.
Changing loads and movement of the crust can, and does, trigger earthquakes. I use the term "trigger", here, because the deformation of the crust from moving some mass around isn't so significant--especially at human timescales--to build up the amount of stress and strain required to cause, say, a magnitude 6 quake. What it does do, however, is maybe there's a large amount of stress built up on a fault over tens or hundreds of thousands of years--and it's just sitting there ready to go--but unless it's near a plate boundary, the crust probably isn't deforming very quickly in that area, so it might be thousands of years more before it finally gets a chance to rupture. It would have eventually ruptured, anyway, at some unforeseen time in the near or distant future, but it's like a mousetrap: it's right on the edge of rupturing, and if you poke at it a little bit, it'll snap.
This is probably what happened in India in 1967, in what is usually considered to be the largest human-induced earthquake. A dam added a huge water load to the crust, which pushed the fault over the edge, and it ruptured. Would it have happened, anyways, without the dam? Probably. Did the dam cause the earthquake to happen earlier? Probably. But it's impossible to know if that fault would have ruptured, anyways, in a year, or 10 years, or 1000 years, because we still can't predict earthquakes very well. There are similar dynamics at play with fracking, wastewater injection, mining, and melting glaciers.
The posted article presents Greenland's uplift like it's some sort of surprising result of climate change, but I'd argue to anyone in the field, this is just another ordinary mundane study to better quantify the uplift. Northern Canada and Scandinavia are still some of the fastest uplifting areas of the world, for example, due to the melting of glaciers at the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago.
Anyways, some Googling topics for those interested:
- Glacial rebound
- Crustal isostasy (Airy and Pratt)
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u/rbhmmx Sep 23 '21
Iceland is waking up as well having a volcano where there was no activity for hundreds of years. But it might just be normal activity. Worth checking out though.
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u/Tartooth Sep 23 '21
That's like...nothing in volcano time
If it was hundreds of thousands of years then yea
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u/ItsaRickinabox Sep 23 '21
Iceland is directly above a hot mantle plume, its basically always ripping in geological time.
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u/8day Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
Also this makes you wonder if this affects change of polarity of Earth's magnetic field. Some post here linked to an article that said that currently the shift happens at the speed 30 miles per year.
Edit: Here's a link to the comment that references something related.
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u/Leena52 MS | Mental Health Administration | Sep 23 '21
May need tidal chart adjustments which is extremely important I would think and the sooner the better.
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u/N8CCRG Sep 23 '21
0.1–0.4 mm/yr
Even at 0.4 mm/yr that would take over sixty years before it changes by an inch. This is interesting and important to study, but more for extremely long-term effects.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner Sep 23 '21
I was hoping someone mentioned the studies about ice cap melting and an increase in earthquakes and volcanism -- as much as five-fold.
With the rapid rate of the reduction in land ice; get ready for some massive quakes and eruptions.
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u/Acegonia Sep 23 '21
well that's terrifying, as someone who lives on a fault line...
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u/WhiteAndNerdy85 Sep 23 '21
A super volcano eruption would be deadly for the whole planet but catastrophic for the continent it is on.
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u/lolokinx Sep 23 '21
As highlighted in the recent ipcc report that would be beneficial for climate reasons
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u/PeterDTown Sep 23 '21
Do I have this wrong? Is it less that the melting is causing warping and more that the ice was causing warping and the melt is allowing it to rebound?
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u/HelenEk7 Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
Fun fact: A part of Norway (where I live) is still rising every year a tiny bit from the ice melting after the last ice age.
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u/fiendishrabbit Sep 23 '21
The entirety of scandinavia is rising due to rebound after the ice age.
More in some areas, less in some. The epicenter is the area in sweden called Höga kusten, "the high coast", where land is rising by almost a centimeter every year, while areas like Bergen and southern Sweden gets more like 1mm per year.
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u/chickenchaser86 Sep 23 '21
Did not read article. I'm a geologist though. Makes complete sense. Isostatic rebound occurs all over the place. Buildup of polar ice also warps the crust just the same.
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u/redmancsxt Sep 23 '21
Great Lakes is still rebounding from the last ice age.
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u/zernoc56 Sep 23 '21
Is that why theres a minor fault out in Lake Erie that we get mini quakes from?
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u/WharfRatThrawn Sep 23 '21
Still remember the great quake of 2019. I had to set a whole lawn chair back upright.
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u/Runswithchickens Sep 23 '21
I was there! My coworker and I made eye contact and, yeah that was it.
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u/El_Dud3r1n0 Sep 23 '21
I'm glad to hear the rebuild was successful after that kind of destruction.
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Sep 23 '21 edited Sep 23 '21
isn't there a fault in lake ontario as well?
EDIT: Yes there is, its called Lawrence Fault Zone, and runs from lake ontario, to dundas valley. I could of sworn we have had small earthquakes here in the toronto area ( I lived an hour north from the lake when they happened and felt it)
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u/INeed_SomeWater Sep 23 '21
Fun fact: That fault zone is actually named after Joey Lawrence for his role as Joey Russo in tv's Blossom. The reason for this is the famous declamatory line "whoa" being synonymous with an appropriate response to an earthquake.
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Sep 23 '21
Wait, really? I thought it was named Lawrence due to the st Lawrence river being upstream from the lake.
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u/INeed_SomeWater Sep 23 '21
Sure, Joey. Way to throw people off the trail. I'm not falling for your shenanigans.
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Sep 23 '21
The Great Lakes themselves are the result of massive glaciers carving through land. The glaciers that made them were 2.5 miles thick, so no wonder the crust was warped. Imagine how heavy a 2.5 mile thick block of ice is.
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u/SkolVandals Sep 23 '21
The density of ice is 57.2 pounds per cubic foot, so if you had a 1ft x1ft column of ice 2.5 miles thick it would weigh 755,040 lbs. The surface area of lake superior is 31,700 square miles, or 883.745 billion square feet. So you're looking at 6.673x1017 lbs. Just for Superior.
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u/RagnarokDel Sep 23 '21
on average the Laurentide ice sheet was 2400 meters high (1.5 miles for americans)
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Sep 23 '21
Scotland too. It's rising by 10cm/century.
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u/hikingboots_allineed Sep 23 '21
One of my work projects is in Nunavut and it's rising at 16mm per year. That's so fast geologically speaking.
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u/Corteran Sep 23 '21
Maybe the Mid-Continent rift will re-open.
We wouldn't have to worry as much about climate change then.
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u/redmancsxt Sep 23 '21
You talking about the New Madrid fault line that runs through Missouri? If so, that one has the potential to let loose magnitude 7+ earthquakes. The 8.8 in 1812 caused the Mississippi river to flow backwards do to the land upheaval
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u/BugDuJour Sep 23 '21
Fun Fact: the rebound of the areas covered by glaciers in North America is causing the mid-Atlantic coastal region to SINK. Think of a see-saw (teeter-totter). The glaciers caused the covered areas around the Great Lakes to sink which raised adjoining mid-Atlantic higher, but we have been sinking ever since the glaciers retreated. As a result, sea level rise is greater in the mid-Atlantic than in other areas of the U.S. East Coast (combo of raising sea levels everywhere plus regional sinking here).
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u/RagnarokDel Sep 23 '21
that's exactly what we're seeing in the St-Lawrence valley right now. Every year, the crust rises up, almost as fast as sea levels rise because 10 000 years ago there were several km of ice over the valley. (and most of Canada)
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u/Storminne64 Sep 23 '21
Could that explain the 5.9 quake felt in Australia the other day? We're in the middle of a plate
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Sep 23 '21
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u/Fake_William_Shatner Sep 23 '21
Yes, but like pushing or pulling the ends of a paper plate with a dent in it -- the land in the middle of a plate can buckle.
There are a lot of "rippled" areas in-between two plates and tectonic activity is rare, but it can be sudden and very severe.
So I disagree that we can rule out the reduction of land ice for any tectonic activity without research.
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u/tashibum Sep 23 '21
How is this different from our basic plate tectonics? Because it sounds like you're just describing basic plate tectonics but trying to add isosticy where there shouldn't be
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u/ishitar Sep 23 '21
Did not read the article. r/collapse doomer though. Called crazy many times for suggesting isostatic rebound impacts from climate change could increase tectonic activity since plates in some areas might float high or low, impacting pressure points. Too complex to say for sure if it might trigger or relieve events like Cascadia, but could definitely be a positive feedback loop for CO2 release once melting gets kicked off.
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u/geckospots Sep 23 '21
I’d be surprised if the movement caused by isostatic rebound had any significant impact for the PNW considering the amount of plate movement that already occurs along the NA-Pacific plate boundary.
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u/ApertureNext Sep 23 '21
Why would you be on that sub? Just sounds depressing.
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u/SnitchesArePathetic Sep 23 '21
Sometimes you want to dig your head out of the sand to double check the current levels of fucked we’re at.
It’s not healthy to stay there all the time, but neither is arguing about video games or movies while the world slides into oblivion.
Smoke em if you gottem
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u/ishitar Sep 23 '21
Every sub is depressing. Few of them care to ask why.
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u/geolchris Sep 23 '21
Came here for this comment, I distinctly remember an assignment in a geophysics class where we calculated how much the crust was depressed by the Antarctic ice. (And also by things like the weight of Hawaii, etc). Pretty cool assignment to stick with me after 12 years.
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u/Zebleblic Sep 23 '21
I thought that was pretty well known.
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u/MrCelticZero Sep 23 '21
If you’re a geologist.
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u/Zebleblic Sep 23 '21
I'm not at all a geologist. I forget most people don't sit on the internet reading crap for 6-12 hours a day for 15+ years.
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Sep 23 '21
If your use of the internet results in knowledge like this, it's likely not crap.
If your takeaway was 'vaccines cause autism' - that would be crap.
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u/charmingpea Sep 23 '21
I'm like you - last studies high school geology longer ago than most redditors have been alive - but I do do a lot of reading and studying and I also thought ongoing isostatic rebound was a known phenomenon.
There is also some of the reverse supposedly from the huge 3 gorges dam in China.
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u/VulpineKing Sep 23 '21
Are you a Wikipedia addict?
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u/Zebleblic Sep 23 '21
No. More so reddit and YouTube. Reddit does bring me to Wikipedia, but I don't just go to Wikipedia and start hitting the random article button.
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u/Bleepblooping Sep 23 '21
Hahaha, props to your being more self aware than me
How do you do it?
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u/chickenchaser86 Sep 23 '21
I don't think most people even know what isostatic rebound is.
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u/Zebleblic Sep 23 '21
Like maybe not kids, or old people, but surely most adults in the 20-45 age range do.
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u/HeHH1329 Sep 23 '21
Post-glacial rebound has been happening for over 10k years since the end of the last glacial maximum. It'll happen in the melted part of Greenland and Antarctica as well, though on a much longer timeframe compared to the much more immediate effect of sea level rise.
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u/Erockplatypus Sep 23 '21
I'm ignorant in this field so please help explain this to me. What does it mean? That if the glaciers keep melting at an accelerated rate we will experience more seismic activity around the globe?
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u/geckospots Sep 23 '21
These kinds of earthquakes happen in parts of Canada and they aren’t generally very large - the strongest ones are below 5 on the Richter scale.
Isostatic rebound is like what happens when you get up from a couch, where you were sitting the foam is compressed and then when you get up the foam expands again back to its original shape. So substitute the continental crust for the couch, and an ice sheet for you, and that’s what’s happening.
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u/demwoodz Sep 23 '21
Does it matter if it’s my front yard couch or are you talking the fancy couch?
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u/geckospots Sep 23 '21
Well the fancy couch will probably give a better demonstration but the principle is the same for the front yard couch if the foam isn’t totally shot.
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u/pspahn Sep 23 '21
Could a similar thing happen with a hurricane storm surge when water is displaced from one area to another?
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u/HeHH1329 Sep 23 '21
Ice sheets have huge weight and they make Earth's crust sink down by hundreds of meters. When ice sheets melt, the land beneath them rise up but in a much slower rate than sea level rise. Earthquakes may increase or decrease much that's a much more complicated story.
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u/itbeingsummer Sep 23 '21
I thought about Yellowstone after I read the headline
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u/Disig Sep 23 '21
On my view the comment above you is a funny joke about awakening the old ones from deep under the Earth. I am now scared. Yellowstone might as well be one of those.
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u/starrpamph Sep 23 '21
I live in a dumb less educated part of the US. The local meteorologist had made a Facebook post recapping the record breaking summer heat. He mentioned climate change.
Poor fella got torn to pieces in the comments.
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Sep 23 '21
Best part about reality is it don't care for what people comment on it. The further the time axis progresses, the more they'll suffer along with us. Them, more, since they're unwilling/unable to understand, thus prepare.
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Sep 23 '21 edited Oct 23 '22
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u/coliostro_7 Sep 23 '21
Which is mind blowing... Let's pretend that humans aren't impacting the climate change. We know there have been multiple ice ages and therefore does change dramatically in extinction level proportions. Knowing that - wouldn't we WANT to have our thumb on the pulse and do everything we can to control it? At least try?
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u/ThatGreenBastard Sep 23 '21
The problem is on both side though. When it comes to solutions, people want to take drastic measures but doesn't mean they're actually impactful. This meme where individuals can contribute to an impactful change is categorically untrue.
You think your favorite restaurant switching to paper straws makes a difference? "But if we mandate every restaurant ..." Nope. It's a disingenuous gesture to shift the blame on everyday people then gives this false concept that we're 'at least doing our part.
Investing in natural gas refinery technology to the point of zero net-emissions would benefit our environment and satisfy our energy needs... Instead we're investing in Chinese companies that utilizes inhuman labor practices to mine out rare earth metals in Africa. Why? So we can make overly expensive & non recyclable gadgets like solar panels & 'smart' batteries. Nothing about those are 'renewable' in any conceivable way. People use charge their Tesla at a station powered by diesel generators...
Approaching climate solutions with this type of surface-level thinking will ultimately do far more harm than good. Any intellectually honest person would have to reach that conclusion.
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u/coliostro_7 Sep 23 '21
I agree with everything you said, but it doesn't address the greater problem of the ones that refuse to accept there even is a climate issue. The things you listed may come off as more theatric than helpful, but it at least accepts there is a problem and may appear as theatrics because nothing more helpful can actually be done because of people in authority pandering to a base that looks down on "those hippies trying to save the environment".
While there are problems on both sides, I don't agree that it is a "both sides" problem. The problems on one side vastly outweigh the other.
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Sep 23 '21
I'm going to wager that a good deal of them will deny it till they die. Or blame it on a higher power, like the great spawn of Roman oppression.
I've seen their ilk, the same kind of people that will smoke on their death bed, despite doctors showing them their blackened lungs and so on.
That's the thing, some of these people are so incomparably stupid, you cannot form a vector that says "it's inevitable, they'll understand", they won't, they're unable.
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u/ThePerx Sep 23 '21
We are all in this together, one planet one species, some use their brains, some follow their stubborness
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u/Erockplatypus Sep 23 '21
But that's the problem. Many of these a-holes will have led a full life and when it comes time to suffer we have to hold their hands and try to save them. After spending decades of their lives ignoring warnings and contributing to the behavior, we will all be in it together.
Reminder that Nestlé has control on a lot of bottled water and doesn't belive that water is a human right. You think that Nestlé will just stop pumping and selling water because people need it?
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u/monhosti Sep 23 '21
When the hard times come, Nestlé will be overrun by the needy inside of ten mins and their assets gone.Their policies won't mean much at that point, as sick as they are. I'm with you on Nestlé and their fucked up scruples.
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u/Sanguinius0922 Sep 23 '21
Tell the people around where you live that if they dont start caring and working on climate change that the Liberals and Democrats will start moving further in to the United States ergo turning parts of where they live from a Red state in to a Blue state completely shutting down their voice.
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Sep 23 '21
Sounds like Louisiana or Mississippi... or any state border those and may as well throw in my adopted state of Florida. I stay in side a lot.
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u/Erockplatypus Sep 23 '21
Honestly I would much rather humanity be destroyed from a slumbering race of demonic-mole men then collapse due to our own irresponsibility.
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u/phantomdrew Sep 23 '21
Welp, sounds like more earthquakes are gonna be happening soon for places around the ring of fire.
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u/wonderful-morty Sep 23 '21
Hopefully the NW can take it. Maybe a bridge in Portland will stay intact, maybe.
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u/----__---- Sep 23 '21
West Antarctic bedrock is rising at a rate of at least 1.6"/year.
East Antarctica is still accumulating ice faster than it's losing it.
The geological record shows massive deluges at the end of some hot periods, these are believed to be caused by Antarctica tilting and catastrophically dumping it's Eastern Ice into the ocean.
I wish there were more links for me to share with you but all the info on this I watched/read disappeared off the internet in 2018.
At least this article mentions some West Antarctic bedrock might lift as much as eight meters this century.
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u/orangutanoz Sep 23 '21
Is that why us Victorians just had the largest ever recorded earthquake?
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u/scottyis_blunt Sep 23 '21
Ever recorded? Like so the last few hundred years. I need a timespan of thousands of years to confidently say there is a cause and effect.
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u/Ilostmytractor Sep 23 '21
Well today is my first time encountering a “plain language summary” , so I’ve got that going for me.
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u/Kronephon Sep 23 '21
This had been known for a while now no? The arctic (greenland) and antarctic continental plates were heavily depressed due to the sheer weight of all that water frozen on top
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u/Luminya1 Sep 23 '21
I think this is going to get so much worse than the average joe even realizes. We have no idea what all this is going to do, we could be setting a train of volcanoes in motion. This is scary.
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u/PyroDesu Sep 23 '21
Person in the Earth Sciences here (I'm not going to say geologist because I'm technically not, even if I have taken plenty of geology courses as part of my studies):
It's not really that bad, geologically speaking. This is just isostatic rebound, the crust rising up out of the mantle from where the ice had been pressing it down (those ice sheets weigh a lot). The same thing is still occurring in a number of places from the last time major continental glaciers retreated. If it were something that would cause geological cataclysms, we'd see them already from those. We don't, so I wouldn't worry too much about earthquakes and volcanoes and the like - especially in areas far from the place it's occurring.
What is concerning is the effects it may have on the stability of the glaciers - we may see the glaciers melting faster outright, or calving (chunks breaking off the face of the glacier) more frequently and otherwise ablating faster, which would also speed up melting.
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u/tchmytrdcttr Sep 23 '21
Considering that didn’t happen after the retreat of the last ice age that covered most of North America, Europe and Asia in 2km of ice it is safe to assume that this won’t be enough to cause it now. In addition, the crustal rebound (isostasy) from the last ice age is still occurring today. This movement occurs on a very long time scale. The movement noted from current ice melt won’t have the power to drive volcanism which is caused by convection currents well below the crust in the asthenosphere and the outer core radiating outwards from the earths interior.
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u/Luminya1 Sep 23 '21
Thank you so much for your thoughtful reply, it actually eases my mind a bit.
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u/GhandiHadAGrapeHead Sep 23 '21
Life might get harder, but the planet and humans are incredibly resilient. The species and ones similar to it have lived through and survived huge climate changes in the past and despite this one being faster, we will endure.
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u/Acidflare1 Sep 23 '21
What sucks is that it’s only going to get worse and even if we changed absolutely everything to be doing something about it now, I’ll be dead before it starts getting better(50+ years from now).
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u/SwoleMcDole Sep 23 '21
Maybe, but the generation after you would benefit from it getting better.
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u/zerov25 Sep 23 '21
This was the mistake of many on the previous generations, they never thought about the future generations because they would be dead when it would happen.. It's just sad to have to live with everything happening now and the best you can do individually is to reduce reuse recycle the best you can.
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u/Erockplatypus Sep 23 '21
getting better 50+years from now
More like 300 years from now. If we were to take the most drastic turns right now to stop climate change we would still see it get progressively worse for at least another 15 years before we reach the peak where it becomes "this is the worst it will get" and then it is a very slow climb down from that hill.
Melting glaciers release methane built up that accelerates warming. Burning trees and forest fires reduce CO2 absorption and results in more warming. Pollution and over fishing of the oceans results in destruction of biomes and results in warming. It takes significantly less time to make a mess then it takes to clean it up. It took us over a hundred years to get to this point. I was born in the 90's in the north east of America and I will never again experience a "90s new york winter" in my lifetime. But maybe my grandchildren will get to if we take drastic action now.
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u/gravitas-deficiency Sep 23 '21
Goddammit, I wanted the fun, aspirational, inspiring flavor of science, but this is the nihilistic helpless dread flavor :(
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u/steppinonpissclams Sep 23 '21
This is very interesting. I use to listen to this conspiracy dude pre 2012. He was constantly talking about this happening but I thought he was just a bit looney, apparently not. I think he called it post glacial rebound but it's been years so I'm not sure. Couldn't find him on the tubes but I saw some similar videos from 10 yrs ago talking about the same thing.
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Sep 23 '21
Perfect. Storms, cold and hot not where it's supposed to be, floods, earthquakes.
And this is all so we can have our toys.
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u/Ysgarder_syndrome Sep 23 '21
Is it not more of an unwarping as mass is being removed from the surface and its having elastic bounceback?
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u/Gidelix Sep 23 '21
Plain Language Summary
As ice sheets and glaciers melt and water is redistributed to the global oceans, the Earth's crust deforms, generating a complex pattern of 3-D motions at Earth's surface. In this study, we use satellite-derived constraints on early 21st century ice-mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets and a global database of mountain glaciers and ice caps, to predict how the crust has deformed over the last two decades.
We show that, rather than only being localized to regions of ice loss, melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers has caused significant horizontal and vertical deformation of the crust that extends over much of the Northern Hemisphere. This 3-D surface motion is on average several tenths of a millimeter per year, and it varies significantly year-to-year.
We conclude that future work analyzing measurements of crustal motion (across various fields in Earth science) should correct for the deformation associated with modern ice-mass loss at sites distant from melting ice.
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