One of the worst doomsday scenarios hypothesized by climate researchers is the notion of a “feedback loop” of melting glaciers releasing so much fresh water into the world’s oceans that it changes the circulation of the oceans itself. This would not only dramatically change weather patterns throughout the world, from creating super-intensity storms to widespread drought, but would happen with great speed—creating substantial changes within a single human lifetime, rather than over millennia. Now, scientists have confirmed that this scenario is not as far-fetched as it might sound.
In other words, the melting of Antarctica’s glaciers appears to be triggering a “feedback” loop in which that melting, through its effect on the oceans, triggers still more melting. The melting water stratifies the ocean column, with cold fresh water trapped at the surface and warmer water sitting below. Then, the lower layer melts glaciers and creates still more melt water — not to mention rising seas as glaciers lose mass.
“What we found is not only a modeling study but is something that we observed in the real ocean,” said Silvano, who conducted the research in Science Advances with colleagues from several other institutions in Australia and Japan. “Our study shows for the first time actual evidence of this mechanism. Our study shows that it is already happening.”
While the research merely confirms that the mechanism of such a feedback loop appears to exist, in Antarctic waters, it could not measure when those changes took place. But the implications as the atmosphere continues to heat up could be dire:
“The idea is that this mechanism of rapid melting and warming of the ocean triggered sea level rise at other times, like the last glacial maximum, when we know rapid sea level rise was five meters per century,” Silvano said. “And we think this mechanism was the cause of rapid sea-level rise.”
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