Ice Loss In West Antarctica Is Speeding Up

An anonymous reader writes: A new study just published on Antarctic ice loss by Christopher Harig and Frederik Simons of Princeton confirm West Antarctica is losing mass fast. The study used satellite measurements to determine the rate of mass loss. The lead author of the study told The Guardian: "It is very important that we continue long term monitoring of how mass changes in ice sheets. For West Antarctica in particular this is important because of how it is thought to be more unstable, where the feedbacks can cause more and more ice loss from the land over time. These strong regional accelerations that we see are very robustly measured and imply that Antarctica may become a major contributor to sea level rise in the near future. This increase in the mass loss rate, in ten years, accelerations like that show that things are beginning to change on human time scales."

Comments

Re:Volcano?

[riverat1]

How big do you think West Antarctica is? They found one relatively small area of volcanic activity under one lobe of one glacier in West Antarctica. The volcanic activity could have been going on for hundreds or thousands of years for all we know. To trump it up as the cause of all West Antarctic ice loss is not warranted by the evidence.

West?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Antarctica have a west?

Re:Volcano?

[hey!]

Jesus H. Christ how does this loopy paranoid bullshit get modded up?

If you're really interested, consider reading The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. He makes the point that traditional conservatism in the US has been largely displaced by authoritarianism -- something that can happen on the right or left but in this case on the right. These aren't grandpa's thrifty, public-spirited Burkean conservatives we're talking about here.