Melting from pole to pole
The Wilkins Ice Shelf is a region of ice in Antarctica roughly the size of Connecticut, and it is collapsing much faster than scientists had predicted. In 1993, the British Antarctic Survey issued a forecast that the shelf would collapse within 30 years; based on the latest observations however, it may instead melt completely within the next couple of seasons:
A thin strip of ice, just 6 kilometres wide, is all that is holding back the collapse of a huge ice shelf in Antarctica, according to glaciologists.
The Wilkins ice shelf – previously some 16,000 square kilometres in area – has been disintegrating fast. On 28 February, an iceberg 41 km long and 2.5 km wide broke off the ice shelf. This triggered the runaway disintegration of a further 570 square kilometres of ice.
"I would be very surprised if it survives more than a couple more melt seasons," says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado, US.
Other researchers, including David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey, believe it could be gone within weeks. "The ice shelf is hanging by a thread – we'll know in the next few days or weeks what its fate will be," he says.
The polar regions are the canaries in the planetary coal mine. They are harbingers for the changes coming to the rest of the world:
Scambos said the poles will be the leading edge of what's happening in the rest of the world as global warming continues.
"Even though they seem far away, changes in the polar regions could have an impact on both hemispheres, with sea level rise and changes in climate patterns," he said.
Among many other consequences, global warming will predictably spur new and more interesting exercises in human greed, including new and more creative wars over the petroleum under the Arctic seabed at the other pole, which is soon to be ice-free:
A U.S.-based company that has controversially laid claim to nearly all of the Arctic Ocean's undersea oil said yesterday that new geological data suggest a "potentially vast" petroleum resource of 400 billion barrels.
That figure is backed by a respected Canadian researcher who recently signed on as the firm's chief scientific adviser.
[...]
Scientists have predicted that global warming could leave the entire Arctic virtually ice-free for months at a time within 20 years. That prospect has hastened a scramble among nations with a polar coast - namely Canada, Russia, the U.S., Norway and Denmark, which controls Greenland - to try to strengthen their scientific claims under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to extended territorial sovereignty over the Arctic Ocean floor.
A report issued last week by the European Union's top two foreign policy officials also highlighted the looming international struggle over Arctic oil deposits.
Anybody want to lay odds on how long it'll be before we see an Arctic petro-war between the US and Russia?