Burning Fossil Reserves Risks 60m Sea Level Rise

Here’s another argument for keeping the world’s fossil fuels in the ground: If all the coal, gas and oil on Earth is extracted and burned, the Antarctic ice sheet will melt entirely, scientists warn in a new “blockbuster” study published last Friday in the research journal Science Advances.

This article made the climate scientist Ken Caldeira, a researcher at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institute of Science and the new study’s senior author, interested in climate change in the first place, and in the Antarctica question.

“Most previous studies of Antarctic have focused on loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet“.

“Burning of accessible fossil fuel assets adequate to wipe out the Antarctic Ice Sheet“.

The comprehensive simulations take into account the impacts of atmospheric and ocean warming on the Antarctic ice as well as feedback mechanisms that might speed up ice discharge and melting processes. “But if we want to pass on cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg or New York as our future heritage, we need to avoid a tipping in East Antarctica”, he says. Melting this part of the ice sheet would raise sea level by about four metres over the course of a few centuries.

“It is much easier to predict that an ice cube in a warming room is going to melt eventually than it is to say precisely how quickly it will vanish”, said Ricarda Winkelmann who helped Caldeira set up the project.

The team used modeling to study the ice sheets evolution over the next 10,000 years, because carbon persists in the atmosphere millennia after it is released.

But at the moment it contributes only about 10% of the sea level rise being driven by climate change as, despite warming, temperatures on the continent are still largely below freezing.

The Antarctic ice cap is the largest on Earth. “If we don’t stop dumping our waste Carbon dioxide into the sky, land that is now home to more than a billion people will one day be under water”.

“For the first time we have shown there is sufficient fossil fuel to melt all of Antarctica”, Winkelmann, told the Guardian.

By contrast, limiting the use of fossil fuels enough to keep global warming below the United Nations goal of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) would keep global sea level rise to “manageable” levels, according to the report.

It added that ice sheets react to climate change slowly. However, Greenland and especially Antarctica with their huge ice volumes are expected to be the major contributors to long-term future sea-level rise.

Read the abstract and get the paper here.