A huge crack is spreading across one of Antarctica’s biggest ice shelves
thestar.com
thestar.com
Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. We humans can fall in love with large chunks of ice just by looking at them long enough. How will we ever bring ourselves to terraform another planet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Protectin...
Thanks, in more ways than one.
We are talking about a planet-scale engineering project; something that is millions of times the scale of anything that has been attempted.
We have only d 13 landing on it, and only something 70 space craft have travelled to Mars or beyond[1].
We have only just found traces of water there, and who knows what else is available (or not).
We have never even attempted to terraform anything, and the closest we've come has been maybe things like desert control programs.
And yet it is supposed to be common knowledge that "it can't be done"? Sure, that is likely to be true, but the idea that we already know the specific things that will stop us seems unlikely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_probes
I love the idea of terraforming Mars, to the point of spending a lot of time understanding the challenges to achieving success.
Conceptually there is always tech which we are yet to discover, but that just pushes the conversation into hand wavy territory, and discussing the details is always more fun.
The simplest plans are to start a runaway green house effect, in order to warm the planet up.
That alone requires signficant but potentially achievable feats of engineering.
But as I remember, the unsolved issue remains in maintaining a stable atmosphere, one which isnt sheared away by solar wind.
This is why the tidal locking issue is the problem. The core is solid on Mars, and the idea of spinning up a planet to rotate puts us beyond space elevator tech and nearing solar engineering levels of ambition.
As someone else suggested, there's the idea of having a super conducting magnet on the equator to create the field.
That's still below solar engineering, but a feat of such magnitude that underground habs win out as an option for the foreseeable future.
Yeah, any atmosphere you give Mars will evaporate over some millions of years.
The obvious workaround is to regenerate it at the same rate. Much like a tire you need to reinflate it now and then.
Humanity will also probably figure out some better tech during the next million years, but even if not, this should work.
Hey, something we are already good at!
To add some substance to this comment, why wouldnt we just try to terraform earth first?
Mars could be a decent staging planet!
Could we be... just a means for mold to spread across the universe?
If you are happy for the end of the species, then that's fine.
After seeing the reception Brian Cox received lately by Australian senator Malcom Roberts on an episode of QanA it's pretty clear we have no hope in world leaders doing anything significant about it. There is way too much self-interest and sociopathic behaviour going on by the majority within these circles of governance and "power".
Too many of us are waiting for the UN to just fix this issue; however, we've relied on the UN and it's narratives of change for too long and the truth is, we the masses need to change our own behaviour, it's our responsibility, somewhere we lost our way. I know there are good people working in these organisations and others like it, doing really good things, there just isn't enough of them or they're not having a big enough impact.
It seems pretty clear that democratic governance has severely failed us on this issue and many others in recent years, and as a society I think we need to try to understand why and correct it. Democracy is obviously not a bad idea, but in most western countries, the current configuration seems to be problematic and corrupt. It's not sustainable.
I have a strong feeling it's now too little to late and the only hope now is to take matters into our own hands by ignoring what democratically elected "leaders" are telling us they're doing and start doing it, get our own hands dirty. Divest, install solar panels (decentralisation of power production is important), consume, travel, eat thoughtfully, don't have so many kids etc.
By the look of it, the only way to make it through the madness ahead will be kindness and compassion for the earth, all living things and each other . If not, mother nature will each us a very harsh lesson, I think she is already starting to balance the books.
Unfortunately this storm is not just going to blow over, it would be nice if it would, but it's not going to.
Why?
This was the situation in Australia until fairly recently, people wanted alternatives but there wasn't any renewable options, then when the Government changed and pulled rebates for new solar installations, it was even more unthinkable for people to get started.
Also, I'm not arguing for complete and utter decentralization, but there needs to be options.
When ice shelves lose large chunks, it does not raise sea level because these
bodies are already afloat. However, the loss of an ice shelf can speed up the
seaward flow of the nonfloating glacial ice behind it, and this ice can in turn
contribute to sea-level rise. Researchers have estimated that the loss of all
the ice that the Larsen C ice shelf currently holds back would raise global
sea levels by 10 centimetres.http://www.miamidade.gov/planning/library/presentations/2014...
They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!
I always hear horror stories of 20 meter rises but don't know what the ranges of "consensus" are...
I seem to remember reading a book back in the day that said New York City would be completely underwater by 2010.
Seems a bit conservative given current sea level rise, but I suppose they have to go with something that everyone will agree to.
Back in the day I read a book that told the story of how a boy discovered that the old vagabond who skulked about his farm was actually the mighty Belgarath the Sorcerer.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Cha...
The worst projected total average increase at 2100 is around 40 cm if we do some corrections in our fossil fuels use and around 80 cm (on average) if we don't (so called "business as usual", they technically call it "RCP8.5" (1)). The local increases (which we now know can be significantly different) are drawn with the scale up to around 1 m for the "some corrections scenarios" if I understood. But it will go up afterwards for hundreds of years, and it can't be stopped.
Mitrovica believes these are too conservative as even the current measurements already hit the upper bounds. It seems anyway the world is more or less behaving in the "business as usual" sense regarding the fossil fuels.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P... It's worth always looking at the RCP8.5, as that's what's going to happen if no significant changes happen. It's not "the most improbable" but "the most probable if nothing changes" and I admit I personally tend to see the graph with more paths as "OK this one is the highest, it's extreme" when it's the default one!
The money and fuel bill for tugboats sufficient to move that would probably be better spent on massive fields of photovoltaics and electricity-intensive seawater desalination equipment...
The only reason anyone cares that there is a crack is because it implies that the ice is shrinking.
And wouldn't a larger shell expose a bigger surface area?
Not easy. This was a problem my high school math tutor, a glaciologist [0],[1] discussed with me one evening doing some applied math.
From memory, using a tug to pull an iceberg from Antartica to the Australian mainland would be difficult because of the forces involved. As the tug would try to pull the iceberg, the iceberg itself is acted on by other forces (gravity, currents). The tug pulling the iceberg, connected by a cable would be acted on by the forces applied by the iceberg resulting in the berg and tug rotating in circles around each other. [2] Adding another tug has similar problems.
The idea isn't stupid, it's just the physics get in the way of achieving a result.
[0] 1970 - 2003 http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2003/antarctic-ice-man-and...
[1] 2003 - 2016 https://rmdb.research.utas.edu.au/public/rmdb/q/indiv_detail...
[2] If memory serves me, Jo used 'moments of inertia' to describe this problem ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
Not that this is reason to celebrate or think that this is any more than a continuation of the ongoing and forthcoming climate excursion.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/21/farewell-to-ic...
What is anybody else going to do that you can't do yourself already?
The decisions that can actually change something are made on government level and depend on believes ingrained into culture / society.
A nice example is Israel and it's shortage of water. There, children are educated from very early on (kingergarden) to be careful with and conserve water wherever possible. It's a common and accepted fact that they have little water and must preserve it.
But changing this kind of thinking for something way less observable and direct, such as global warming, is harder. And needs a unified effort by government, education and media. And takes decades.
But that's usually only the case for things that can be felt, witnessed and judged more directly.
Politicians are not stupid. If the environmentalist grass roots do not believe in their cause badly enough to go and change their personal lives first, they will only receive token efforts and empty promisses. And that's because the politicians do (correctly, IMHO) assume than environmentalist only want to wash away their guilt, not achieve actual changes. As in, changes that will negatively affect their personal lives.
Of course, what environmentalist say they want is to have politicians affect everybody's lives... but in practical terms, that means to affect primarily the lives of those that are underrepresented in the political arena. Everybody else is going to push back when real cost come upfront. And since this is the same people that has been thrown under the bus by every other class and group of interest during the last few decades, they cannot be made to pay the cost.
And, more important, for the needed changes to be embraced by enough people to matter, you need a narrative that let them believe they are achieving something of value. That cannot be done with propaganda alone. They need examplars, people who have done what it takes to effect a change in their own lives, who have paid the personal costs, and who are not deprived and miserable because of it, but actually happy and even successful.
The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometres in length
between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider — by
2015, yawning some 200 meters in length.
"And as it grew, also became wider — by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in length."
They use "wider" and "length" to describe the same 200 meter span.
The correct word for a measurement of wideness is width.
Length [NOUN]: 1. the longest extent of anything as measured from end to end: the length of a river. 2. the measure of the greatest dimension of a plane or solid figure.
It's pretty unambiguously wrong. You can back into what the author meant without ambiguity, but that doesn't mean the author used the correct word.