{"id":235987,"date":"2025-10-19T09:19:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T09:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/235987\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T09:19:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T09:19:19","slug":"antarctica-is-starting-to-look-a-lot-like-greenland-and-that-isnt-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/235987\/","title":{"rendered":"Antarctica is starting to look a lot like Greenland\u2014and that isn\u2019t good"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen in Antarctica. And that\u2019s really not true,\u201d said Mottram, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers, and increased surface melting in satellite data.<\/p>\n

One of the early warning signs was the rapid collapse of an ice shelf along the narrow Antarctic Peninsula, which extends northward toward the tip of South America, said Helen Amanda Fricker<\/a>, a geophysics professor with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Polar Center<\/a> at the University of California, San Diego.<\/p>\n


\n \"Chunks
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where a long-term meltdown is well underway.<\/p>\n

\n Credit:
\n Bob Berwyn\/Inside Climate News\n <\/p>\n

\n Stranded remnants of sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula are a reminder that much of the ice on the frozen continent around the South Pole is just as vulnerable to global warming as Arctic ice, where a long-term meltdown is well underway.<\/p>\n

Credit:<\/p>\n

Bob Berwyn\/Inside Climate News<\/p>\n

After a string of record-warm summers riddled the floating Rhode Island-sized slab of ice with cracks and meltwater ponds, it crumbled almost overnight. The thick, ancient ice dam was gone, and the seven major outlet glaciers behind it accelerated toward the ocean, raising sea levels as their ice melted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Larsen B ice shelf collapse<\/a> in 2002 was a staggering event in our community,\u201d said Fricker, who was not an author of the new paper. \u201cWe just couldn\u2019t believe the pace at which it happened, within six weeks. Basically, the ice shelves are there and then, boom, boom, boom, a series of melt streams and melt ponds. And then the whole thing collapsed, smattered into smithereens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glaciologists never thought that events would happen that quickly in Antarctica, she said.<\/p>\n

Same physics, same changes<\/p>\n

Fricker said glaciologists thought of changes in Antarctica on millennial timescales, but the ice shelf collapse showed that extreme warming can lead to much more rapid change.<\/p>\n

Current research focuses on the edges of Antarctica, where floating sea ice and relatively narrow outlet glaciers slow the flow of the ice cap toward the sea. She described the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a giant ice reservoir contained by a series of dams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235988,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[192,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-235987","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235987\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}