The eastern part of the Antarctic continent has long been considered the most stable region, rarely affected by global warming or erosion by warm currents. Unfortunately, the latest satellite imagery shows that the ice sheet in East Antarctica has begun to collapse in a chain! The collapsed Glenzer Conger ice shelf, which exceeded the Hong Kong area to about 1,200 square kilometers, marked the first ice shelf collapse in East Antarctica on record, something previously thought was almost impossible.
(NASA/AP)
Since March, a "water vapor pipeline" has been pumping vast amounts of heat from the tropics to the poles, while a massive high-pressure thermal dome hovers over east Antarctica, locking heat and water vapor into the South Pole. After March 20, a record-breaking heat wave hit both the Antarctic and the Arctic, which was the last straw that crushed the camels – the maximum temperature in the Antarctic region reached -11.5C, 30°C higher than normal! This is a shocking phenomenon in Antarctica, especially as Antarctica is about to enter the polar night, not in the height of summer. This is one of the reasons why the Glenzer Conger ice shelf broke.
The Eastern Ice Sheet is connected to antarctica's highest, driest and coldest southeastern pole. Peter Neff, a glaciologist at the University of Minnesota in the United States, said on Tiktok, "In the previous model deduction, we did not expect to witness the collapse of this ice shelf one day, and the impossible finally happened!" ”
Ice scientists at the Woods Hall Institute of Oceanography also say we may be witnessing the consequences of a long-neglected warming of the oceans – constantly melting, melting again...
What does this mean for wildlife?
The Adélie penguins, which live along the coastline of the entire Antarctic continent, have just recently finished breeding in the summer, and thankfully, the young of the Adélie penguins are already capable of going out to sea and starting to hunt on their own, so the extreme heat waves in Antarctica have not affected them much. But unusually large amounts of rain may have destroyed the local vegetation ecology, such as moss. Since the mossy vegetation is in the winter phase at this time, we will not know until next summer whether they will suffer any damage.
The future of the Arctic and Antarctic
Through modeling, climatologists have found that today's large-scale climate models have become more complex and changeable, which means that this seemingly occasional heat wave is not going away, but may be a catastrophic harbinger of climate change. As humans emit more greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global temperatures are rising rapidly, and the north and south poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expects Arctic sea ice to continue at its current rate of convergence, with the likely emergence of an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the 2050s.
The future of Antarctica is also not optimistic. The IPCC believes that global warming in the 21st century will be between 2 and 3°C, which will cause the ice sheet in Antarctic Southwest Antarctica to melt almost completely. According to the British "Guardian", in fact, long before this heat wave, Antarctica was already in the lowest sea ice coverage on record.
The Glenzer Conger Ice Shelf has been around for thousands of years, but it will never exist in the future. Since the 1970s, the Glenzer Conger ice shelf has been slowly shrinking, but its melting rate has accelerated sharply after 2020, halving its area about every month. This worrying event suggests that even areas that Earth scientists don't think will be affected by the climate crisis are starting to become vulnerable.
Reference:Record-smashing heatwaves are hitting Antarctica and the Arctic simultaneously. Here’s what’s driving them, and how they’ll impact wildlife, the conversation,March 22, 2022