Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Losing the Greenland ice sheet would be catastrophic to humanity today. The melted ice would raise sea level by more than 20 feet. That would redraw coastlines worldwide.
A new study finds that human-caused climate change made the extreme “mass loss” seen in glaciers in the Southern Alps, New Zealand, in 2018 at least 10 times more likely. Another mass loss event in 2011 was made at least six times more likely by climate change.
Because the expectation of climate scientists is that the high latitudes will experience the largest degree of warming due to global warming, I decided many years ago to monitor temperatures at various widespread locations in northern North America.
The warming the world has already experienced could be enough to melt more than a third of the world’s glaciers outside Antarctica and Greenland – regardless of current efforts to reduce emissions. That is the stark conclusion of a new study, which analyses the lag between global temperature rise and the retreat of glaciers.
The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. (A Rolling Stone feature earlier this year dubbed Thwaites “The Doomsday Glacier.”) Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.
Craig Russell’s Fragment succeeds on multiple fronts. On one level, it’s a fascinating work of idea-fiction that tells a tale of first contact between humans and whales. It also spins an absorbing thriller yarn in which a motley group of humans and a lone, heroic whale join forces to face an unprecedented threat. On a third level, the book offers important insights into the gravest ecological reality of our time, climate change, without ever coming across as didactic or preachy.
For two towns in northern India, melting glaciers have had very different impacts — one town has benefited from flowing streams and bountiful harvests; but the other has seen its water supplies dry up and now is being forced to relocate.
The great floods across parts of southern England may have abated, but questions over their linkage to climate change are among the most powerful residues.
