14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, used by climate skeptics as a “clear indicator” that global warming is not men-made, East Antarctica has finally succumbed to global warming, experts announced. While, over the past few years, it has shown a cooling trend, as opposed to the Western parts of the continent, recent measurements have revealed that it is currently losing billions of tons of ice yearly. So, much for the skeptics' best argument for a “socialist conspiracy,” but unfortunately this is one of the those instances in which we, those who believe in global warming and its connections to our race, wish we were wrong and the others right.
According to the paper, the Eastern parts of the continent have been losing mass not since yesterday, but for the last three years. The drop began in 2006, scientists at the University of Texas in Austin (UTA) Center for Space Research, show. Expert Jianli Chen, the team leader, used advanced satellite measurements to arrive to this unfortunate conclusion. The new work disproves previous researches, which have argued that East Antarctica is stable or even gaining mass. However, those studies were extremely detrimental for environmental efforts, as it gave conservative politicians and right-wing religious extremists the opportunity to pick on solid research that shows global warming affects us all.
“This paper provides the most accurate measurements to date of the current rate of mass loss from Antarctica,” says University of Washington in Seattle glaciologist Eric Steig. Chen and colleagues reveal that the Eastern parts of the continent are losing as much as 5 billion tons of mass each single year, which may not seem like much at first. The thing about Antarctica is that it is surrounded by sea-based ice shelves, which keep the ground-based ices at bay. When the former melt and disappear, the latter accelerate their flows and head for the oceans, threatening the world's coastlines with floods.
For the new study, “we've used the best available data set and the most up-to-date models to provide the most accurate estimates yet of ice loss in Antarctica,” explains Study coauthor Clark Wilson, a scientist at the Center for Space Research. According to University of Sheffield polar ice mass researcher Edward Hanna, the investigation “underlines the importance of Antarctica as the formerly sleeping giant of global sea level rise that is no longer slumbering, but is now undergoing a rude awakening.” Details of the paper appear in the latest issue of the respected journal Nature Geosciences, NewScientist reports.