What a Happy New Year we are in for. Toward the end of the last millenia, in the nineteen nineties, sea level rise by the end of the century was estimated to be a matter of some inches.
Here we are twenty years later its 2010 and we are now talking a matter of some meters. The worst projections of the scenarios of the last IPCC report are now no longer projections and scientists are talking about the suprising acceleration at which temperature is rising and the ice is melting.
Both poles are warming much faster than the average global warming so that while we sit here complaining about the cold where we live now what we ought to be doing is enjoying it while it lasts. Once water no longer exists in its solid crysililine state there is going to be a lot of other stuff that no longer exists, probably including us.
Around the Antarctic Peninsula, where regional warming has been on a record-setting pace, sea ice has declined significantly. Work by U.S. Antarctic Program scientists in the region has found that the increase is about 6.5 degrees Celsiusin the winter since the 1950s, rising more than five times faster than the global average. The life cycle of winter sea ice, on average, has dropped by three months per year, meaning it forms later and melts earlier. Year-round sea ice has virtually disappeared.
As rhe time until the end of the century has diminished, and the rate at which change is observed has increased, some scientists are beginning to factor in exponential as opposed to linear scenarios where the rate of change changes at increasing rates.
In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica, too, is showing signs of a warming climate. Annual ice mass loss for the entire continent more than doubled between the periods 2002–06 and 2006–09. In March 2009, a 400-square-kilometer piece of ice broke off of the Wilkins ice shelf, the tenth ice shelf collapse on the Antarctic Peninsula in recent times. The most notable break-up was that of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, which covered some 3,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Rhode Island. The West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) lost 59 percent more ice in 2006 than it did in 1996. A fast-flowing drainage glacier of WAIS, the Pine Island glacier, experienced a quadrupling in its average rate of volume loss between 1995 and 2006. Previously well-established as stable or even gaining mass, the East Antarctic ice sheet may in fact be shrinking. A late 2009 Nature Geoscience study points toward a net melting of the ice sheet since 2006. This new discovery adds to the ever-growing fears of ice sheet collapse and sea level rise. With increased melting, scientists say sea level could rise as much as 2 meters by the end of this century.
I mention this just to refresh your memory since you surely are aware of this by now. What very few researchers seem to be focusing on is the geophysical effect of losing all that ice. As isostatic rebound occurs volcanoes and earthquakes are on the increase from Alaska to the Phillipines and most spectacularly at Yellowstone.