Exceptional heat waves are occurring all across the world, historic and record-breaking warm ocean temperatures that are breaking record, and historically low sea ice levels around Antarctica.
The average global temp has increased by more than 1.5 degree Celsius over the last 38 days. 2023 will go down in history as the hottest year ever. Humans are one of the main causes for global warming and the main cause of the recent extreme heat. The impacts of water vapor from an underwater volcano, African dust, and the El Niño global climate pattern.
Co-leader William Ripple of Oregon State University College of Forestry said, “We’re headed toward a world with extreme heat and shortages of food and fresh water, as well as the possible partial collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems.”
“Earth’s climate is ‘entering uncharted territory,’ new report claims” – ABC News
As the earth heats up, more warm water is seeping into the undersides of West Antarctica’s ice shelves, massive tongues of ice at the end of glaciers. Due to these shelves’ huge expanse, the ice on the land cannot melt into the open sea as quickly. As a result, more ice from the land floats towards the ocean as the shelves malt and get thinner, eventually raising the sea level. The exact amount by which decreasing pollution from fossil fuels could halt this melting is unclear to scientists.
“It appears that we may have lost control of the West Antarctic ice-shelf melting over the 21st century,” one of the researchers, Kaitlin A. Naughten, an ocean scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, said at a news briefing. “That very likely means some amount of sea level rise that we cannot avoid.”
In the future, scientists are trying to figure out when greenhouse gas emissions would cause the West Antarctic ice sheet to reach a “tipping point” that would make it collapse fast and hard to undo, threatening coasts all around the world. In the beginning, the researchers estimated an increase in ocean temperature and resulting melting of the ice shelf in the 20th century using computer simulations.
