The irreparable climate change scientists have been predicting for decades may be under way, according to two new studies of West Antarctica glaciers.
Scientists have found that large parts of the vital West Antarctica ice sheet have begun to melt; they predict the collapse will be gradual during the next century and then accelerate, The New York Times reported.
"This is really happening," Thomas P. Wagner, who leads NASA's polar ice programs and oversaw some of the new research, told the Times. "There's nothing to stop it now. But you are still limited by the physics of how fast the ice can flow."
The two new studies will be published this week in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, respectively. In both projects, scientists found that relatively warm water upwelling from the ocean's depths is responsible for the ice sheet's new vulnerability.
The eventual collapse of West Antarctica is inevitable even if possible contributing factors, which include natural climate variability and warming gases from human sources, are mitigated or reversed.
Reducing the rate of warming would be "too little, too late to stabilize the ice sheet," said Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington and lead author of the new paper in Science, as quoted by the Times. "There's no stabilization mechanism."
The ice sheet's eventual meltdown is predicted to raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet, NBC News reported. In the University of Washington study to be published in Science, researchers show evidence that the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is losing tens of feet of ice every year and estimate that the glacier will be gone within a thousand years.
"There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place."
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