Thursday, May 29, 2014

Weird Antarctic Ice Science

Science 2.0 reports new research published in Nature has shown that the Antarctic ice sheet is highly variable and has been so for at least 20,000 years. The following comment is attributed to Michael Weber of the University of Cologne:
One of the iceberg events in our data that is of particular interest took place 14,600 years ago and coincided with a huge ice-sheet melt, the famous Meltwater Pulse 1A, which according to previous studies led to a global sea level rise of about 4 meters within 100 years.
No one believes that neolithic humans had much to do with that event. Climate varies, has done so forever, and will continue to do so without our help.

A sea level rise of over 13 feet in 100 years is a big deal, about 1.5 inches per year. It would, for example, put much of Bangladesh underwater. Mankind ought to plan now how we'll react to such a rise when (not if) it happens again.