Antarctica – Paul Noël

Can We Really Have Screwed Up This Bad? – Yes We Have

First posted in July 2018 and it has got a lost worse since then.

How much more evidence do we need before we admit that the industrial revolution has been a complete disaster for the environment and that our economic monopoly model of continuous expansion and consumption at the expense of exploited humans is deleterious to the life support systems and eventually to us.

Pristine Antarctic fjords contain similar levels of microplastics to open oceans near big civilisations

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Antarctica loses three trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years

First posted in June 2018 and since then the situation has got far worse and will continue to do so while we increasingly burn fossil fuels.

Changes to our environment appear to be accelerating and their effects will have far ranging consequences. With species not being able to move or just not move quickly enough the changes will probably also accelerate species extinction.

Antarctica loses three trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years

For an excellent source of information on what’s happening to ice be sure to look at Zach Labe’s website, https://zacklabe.com/, or find him on Twitter.

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Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton clothes and bags, https://junagarh-media.teemill.com/.

My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.

This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.

We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.

Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.

Our Etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/JunagarhMedia.

Thwaites. If you don’t know the name then you certainly will

A man called Frederik T. Thwaites was a glacial geologist and geomorphologist working at the University of Wisconsin. A perhaps not very well remembered man but his name was assigned to a glacier that is part of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. The name Thwaites, in this instance, will be a part of every human being’s life. If not now then in the very near future and for generations to come. Recent research appears to show that the ice shelf holding the glacier in place is disintegrating faster than originally thought. When it does the glacier will move more quickly towards the ocean and may lead to the collapse of the whole of the WAIS. The future is going to be very different for the children alive today and those yet to be born.

A Scientific American article on the current state of Thwaites, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/antarcticas-collapse-could-begin-even-sooner-than-anticipated/.

Thwaites glacier – never heard of it

The Thwaites glacier is a very important piece of ice far away in Antarctica so most people will not have come across it in their daily lives. So we all wake up and today looks like yesterday but at one of the far ends of the world the ice is beginning to melt. On its own the Thwaites glacier contains enough water to raise sea levels by 65cm. It doesn’t sound huge because when we look at a beach or a coastline what do we see? However its collapse and subsequent melting will have significance for 10s if not 100s of millions of people in the future living on the coasts of the world. Since our exodus from Africa the human race has become very attached to living by the sea and we always thought that the shoreline was at a constant height apart from the tides but we have changed all that through our burning of fossil fuels. The Thwaites glacier is one of the major glaciers holding the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet in place so it’s not just its melting and collapse that is important. Currently the Thwaites glacier is being attacked underneath by warm circumpolar deep water upwelling. With the majority of the heat being trapped by the higher levels of greenhouse gases entering the oceans the warm warmer water is affecting the integrity of the ice. Only relatively recently have we had the technology to study what is going on. This article describes the latest research.

First look under imperilled Antarctic glacier finds ‘warm water coming from all directions’

The world was very different then

Humanity got lucky. Everything from agriculture to Alexa was thought up in a fairly comfortable interglacial period. This interglacial is part of an ice age, one of many stretching back 2.58 million years. In that time the level of CO2 in the atmosphere at the height of the last eight interglacial has been around 280ppm. So you would think that if we currently had a level of 415ppm CO2, a level that has not been seen for at least 3 million years, that a few alarm bells would be ringing and they are. Apart from the fact that nobody is taking them seriously. Our leaders and business people who appear to be mostly male are playing a game of who blinks first while applying bridge crew of the Titanic economics. Although Earth will not return to the conditions that this article describes we are in for some big changes. Young children and those yet to be born will be the most adversely affected but that’s not to say that the younger adults will not suffer as well. We must also remember that the world is full of a lot of sophisticated weaponry and if society breaks down, if maybe there is a dispute over diminishing fresh water, we could as humans be in for a very rough ride. Fossil fuel emissions must be drastically reduced now.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/01/world/antarctica-ancient-rainforest-scn/index.html