Adventures in Global Warming: Antarctic Glacier ‘Melted JUST as Fast LONG Before Human Carbon Emissions’
23rd February 2014
The Pine Island Glacier has been much studied over the last two decades, as the rate of ice melting into the sea there has accelerated during those years. Many scientists have theorised that this might be due to global warming caused by human burning of fossil fuels. It’s been suggested that the PIG on its own might cause sea levels to rise by several centimetres this century (for background the seas rose about 17cm in the last century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects this to increase massively this century, though there’s plenty of research to suggest otherwise.)
However it now appears that the recent rapid flow of the PIG into the sea may just be one of those things that happens from time to time, as it did 8,000 years ago. This is borne out by research from 2010, in which BAS boffins sent a robot submarine under the glacier’s projecting ice shelf and found that its acceleration in recent times probably resulted from the fact that it has just finished grinding away a troublesome underwater reef which was slowing it down and causing ice to back up.