All posts tagged: West Antarctic Ice Sheet

We’ve Made a Cosmic Choice for Earth’s Oceans

We’ve Made a Cosmic Choice for Earth’s Oceans

Even after nearly three months of winter, the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere are disturbingly warm. Last summer’s unprecedented temperatures—remember the “hot tub” waters off the coast of Florida?—have simmered down to a sea-surface average around 68 degrees Fahrenheit in the North Atlantic, but even that is unprecedented for this time of year. The alarming trend stretches around the world: 41 percent of the global ocean experienced heat waves in January. The temperatures are also part of a decades-long hot streak in the oceans. “What we used to consider extreme is no longer an extreme today,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me. The situation is expected to worsen. Research suggests that by the end of the century, much of the ocean could be in a permanent heat wave relative to historical thresholds, depending on the quantity of greenhouse gases that humans emit. Many other changes will unfold alongside those hot ocean temperatures: stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels, unmanageable conditions for marine life. Our seas, …

The Climate Contradiction That Will Sink Us

The Climate Contradiction That Will Sink Us

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the fight against climate change is finally going well. The clean-energy revolution is well under way and exceeding expectations. Solar is set to become the cheapest form of energy in most places by 2030, and the remarkable efficiency of heat pumps is driving their own uptake now. Sales of electric vehicles could surpass those of gas-burning cars in the next six years. The world’s biggest powers are putting huge sums toward infrastructure to usher in some form of energy transformation. Pledges are being made; legislation is being passed. The world, it seems, is finally lurching in the right direction. But none of that is enough, practically speaking, because of one enormous hitch: The world is still using more energy each year, our consumption ticking ever upward, swallowing any gains made by renewable energy. Emissions are still rising—more slowly than they used to but, nonetheless, rising. Instead of getting pushed down, that needle is fitfully jiggling above zero, clawing into the positive digits when it needs to be deeply pitched …

I Was There as the World’s Widest Glacier Split Apart

I Was There as the World’s Widest Glacier Split Apart

Out on the bow of the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, the air is dense and almost warm. We have punched through miles of Antarctic ice floes to reach the Amundsen Sea’s foggy interior. I want to honor the remaining distance between us and Thwaites Glacier’s calving front––this place that many scientists suggest could make a catastrophic impact on global sea levels but that no one, as of this moment in February of 2019, had ever before visited by ship––and yet I don’t really know what to do except stand here. Just off the port side: a half-flipped iceberg in the shape of a pyramid. It looks like a ruin, something time has partially undone—what rested below the water line waxed away by the heat of the sea, the once-sunk ice smooth as glass. That night, sound sleep eludes me. I wake often, each time hopeful that we have arrived. Finally, around 5 o’clock, I rise. Shuffle up the five flights of stairs that separate my cabin from the bridge. Outside, Thwaites’s gray margin wobbles in …