We Must Do Better, For Our Children -- And Theirs... As 10,000 Years Of Stability In The Ice Shelves Literally Collapses, In A Few Decades.

The masthead, and these warnings -- are not new.

But rising oceans, due to melting polar caps. . . do pose an existential threat to the way almost all humans live their lives, on Earth. It is no exaggeration to say that in desert regions, ones with only limited wealth (and thus little access to expensive high technology fixes), this might begin a wide-scale extinction event.

So, as G-7 concludes, we must collectively get far more serious about real measures to slow the pollution that is contributing to the ice melt. Here's a bit from last month, in the journal of Physics:

. . .Publishing this month in the journal Geology an international team describes how the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been stable for the past ~10,000 years.

The vast Larsen Ice Shelf, twice the size of Wales, attracted global media attention, after a 5,800-square-kilometer iceberg weighing more than a trillion tons calved in 2017. Last month (April) it broke up completely, following a three year journey drifting from the Antarctic Peninsula to the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia.

Over the past 25 years, several of the region's ice shelves have collapsed, including the rapid disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002. The sequential breakup of ice shelves along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula is linked to warmer atmospheric temperatures which have gradually moved southward over the past 50 years. At the same time, warm ocean currents have also increased, weakening the region's ice shelves from below. . . .

"We now have a much clearer picture of the pattern and extent of ice shelf break-ups, both past and present. It starts in the north and progresses southward as the atmosphere and ocean warms. Should collapse of Larsen C happen, it would confirm that the magnitudes of ice loss along the eastern Antarctic Peninsula and underlying climate change are unprecedented during the past 10,000 years" says Smith. . . .

We cannot afford to wait for that to happen. Onward -- we each need to do concrete things, to take care of your mother, people. She is the. . . Earth.

नमस्ते