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Antarctica's Ice Flow Fully Mapped For the First Time
tvlinux writes "Antarctica is a big continent, so mapping all of its ice flow isn't exactly a piece of cake. But for the first time scientists have been able to get the complete picture of the southernmost continent's ice flow, from the South Pole to the shoreline. From the article: '"This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time. It's a game changer for glaciology," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California (UC), Irvine. Rignot is lead author of a paper about the ice flow published online Thursday in Science Express. "We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before."'"
Oh, there's enough ice there it will take several thousand years for all of it to melt. But the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could slide into the ocean pretty fast which would be a problem. A collapse if the WAIS would amount to over 15 feet of sea level rise.
"What happened to geology for its own sake?"
People insisted that scientists show how their work is relevant to things of concern to taxpayers, because taxpayers are often funding part of the research. That pretty much sums up the reasons why the broader implications of a study get mentioned in journalistic reports no matter how interesting the regular scientific aspects are on their own. Science is the accumulation of a lot of smaller studies that incrementally add up. Individually they usually aren't some great revolution in understanding. But journalists love to increase the drama.
And it's not scaremongering. It's kind of like the grounded coastal ice is acting as a dam for ice moving from the interior. Remove it (by melting and/or breakup), and the ice streams will move much further inland and tap into the main parts of the cap, meaning you haven't just removed the coastal ice and added it to sea level, you've accelerated the movement of the entire land-based icecap into the sea. This is not scaremongering, it's the natural result of a better understanding the dynamics of ice motion in Antarctica. Having a map of the current ice motion over the entire continent is a big advance, and it also means the whole thing can be monitored for longer-term changes.