Man the lifeboats
Everywhere we look change is accelerating far beyond what the IPCC projected.
Satellite-derived image of the surface topography of Antarctica. Shown in color are the flow speeds of glaciers draining ice into the oceans. The scale is meters per year. It is noticeable how the rate speeds up in narrow glacier outlets. (Credit: Jonathan Bamber)
ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2008) — Increasing amounts of have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years, according to research from the University of Bristol and published online recently in Nature Geoscience.
[snip]
They arrived at a best estimate of a loss of 132 billion tonnes of ice in 2006 from — up from about 83 billion tonnes in 1996 — and a loss of about 60 billion tonnes in 2006 from the
Professor Bamber said: “To put these figures into perspective, four billion tons of ice is enough to provide drinking water for the whole of the UK population for one year.”
[snip]
Over the 10 year time period of the survey, the as a whole was certainly , and the mass loss increased by 75% during this time. Most of the mass loss is from the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica and the northern tip of the Peninsula where it is driven by ongoing, pronounced glacier acceleration. In East Antarctica, the is near zero, but the thinning of its potentially vulnerable marine sectors suggests this may change in the near future.
