Last week, the temperature in Antarctica hit almost seventy degrees--the hottest in recorded history.

[inanna]

Last week, the temperature in Antarctica hit almost seventy degrees—the hottest in recorded history. It wasn’t a one-day fluke. Famed for its snowscapes, the Earth’s coldest, wildest, windiest, highest, and most mysterious continent has been experiencing a heat wave. A few days earlier, an Antarctic weather station recorded temperatures in the mid-sixties. It was colder in Washington, D.C., where I live. Images of northern Antarctica captured vast swaths of barren brown terrain devoid of ice and with only small puddle-like patches of snow.

The problem is not whether a new record was set, “it’s the longer-term trend that makes those records more likely to happen more often,” John Nielsen-Gammon, the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A. & M. University, told me this week. “It’s sort of like a forest where trees are constantly growing and trees are dying, but if they start dying faster than they can grow back, then you eventually lose the forest,” he said. “The same thing applies to glaciers. Glaciers flow out to the ocean and break off, but if they break off faster then the glacier retreats and you lose ice—and then the sea level goes up around the world.”

The iceberg that I watched break off from Antarctica was part of a process called calving. It’s normal and a necessary step in nature’s cycle, except that it’s now happening a lot faster and in larger chunks—with existential stakes. The ice in Antarctica is now melting six times faster than it did forty years ago, Eric Rignot, an Earth scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of a major study of the continent’s ice health, told me.

This month, an iceberg measuring more than a hundred square miles—the size of the Mediterranean island of Malta, or twice the size of Washington, D.C.—broke off the Pine Island Glacier (lovingly known as PIG, for short) in West Antarctica. It then broke up into smaller “pig-lets,” according to the European Space Agency, which tracked them by satellite. The largest piglet was almost forty square miles.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/antarcticas-ice-the-one-war-that-the-human-species-cant-lose?utm_source=pocket-newtab

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. Thanks to GOPer rule, we're past climate crisis; we're in climate catastrophe now.

[JesterCS]

2. Saw many Trump-humpers claiming

But it's summer down there and it's at the northern most tip of Antarctica... So climate change is fake..... I facepalmed