What will happen to our planet if Antarctica melts?
Miscellaneous / / September 28, 2023
The consequences will be catastrophic.
Sea level will rise by 58 meters
Video: Business Insider / YouTube
For the entire Antarctic ice sheet to melt almost completely, enough increase in average global temperature by 10 degrees. At the same time, sea level will rise at 58 m.
This will lead to the destruction of many coastal cities. Among them are London, New York, New Orleans, Cairo, Bangkok, Venice, Copenhagen, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Seattle, San Diego, St. Petersburg, Riga and Stockholm.
Not only cities, but also individual regions and entire countries can hide underwater. For example, large areas of the Netherlands and Denmark, large areas of Canada and Russia, Bangladesh, almost the entire US state of Florida, Paraguay and parts of Central America will flooded. And Cambodia will turn into an island.
China and Australia are a disaster too will affect. First of all, the coastal Chinese provinces, where about 600 million people live, and the densely populated Australian coast, where about four-fifths of the continent's population is concentrated.
The homes of almost 40% of the planet's inhabitants will be washed away
According to report World Bank, if in the next 30 years the average global temperature rises by 2 degrees, approximately 216 millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America will be forced to flee their Houses. Such people are called climate refugees.
What happens if the temperature will rise 10 degrees at once? According to University of California glaciologist Matthew Morlighem, almost 40% of the world's population live in areas that could be flooded if Antarctica melts. This means there will be at least 3.5 billion climate refugees in the world.
Humanity will experience a shortage of fresh water
Those living inland may think that the melting of Antarctic ice will only affect coastal inhabitants. But that's not true.
On Antarctica concentrated about 61% of all fresh water on Earth. Of course, frozen. It would seem that if the continent melts, then all drinking problems in the world will immediately be solved. However, in reality the effect will be the opposite.
If sea level rises by the mentioned 58 m, salt water World Ocean will start permeate into groundwater in the interior of continents. This will not only reduce drinking water supplies, but will also cause enormous damage to agriculture. Irrigation will become impossible - even at a relative distance from the coast, salt will appear in wells and aquifers.
There will be many potentially dangerous microorganisms in the ocean
We watched horror films like "Something"Carpenter, where life forms hostile to people, waiting in the ice for millions of years, thawed out and carried out a massacre? Microbiologists from Montana State University considerthat this is a completely realistic scenario. Of course, giant alien mutant spiders cannot be found in the permafrost, but some kind of bubonic plague or anthrax is welcome.
Scientists call Antarctica a repository of genes. Some microorganisms “preserved” there more 8 million years old and still viable. Melting ice will release viruses, bacteria, fungi and other microbes that have been trapped until now.
It will be extremely difficult to slow down the spread of diseases, because modern living beings have no immunity to ancient threats.
There are known cases where unfrozen pathogens infected people. For example, in 2016, ancient disputes anthrax, stored in the ice of Siberia, brought to the death of a child and the hospitalization of 20 more people, simultaneously killing several thousand deer.
Scientists from the University of Helsinki simulated the spread of microorganisms from permafrost and came to the conclusion that even one ancient pathogen can cause mass epidemics and deaths around the world.
In general, if everything that is dormant in the ice of Antarctica suddenly wakes up and finds itself in ocean water, a pandemic coronavirus It will seem like a mild seasonal runny nose to humanity.
Seismic activity will increase across the planet
The melting of Antarctica will lead to much less obvious consequences than rising sea levels. Harvard University Professor Jerry Mitrovica explainsthat the loss of the Antarctic ice sheet also means a change gravity Earth.
Our planet spins around its axis, like a figure skater on ice. If a skater moves an arm or leg, his center of mass will shift slightly—and his spin will change. It's the same with the entire planet. All the ice on Antarctica weighs approximately 24 quadrillion 380 trillion tons.
If this mass is distributed throughout the planet, a day on Earth will lengthen for 20 seconds.
It would seem that days and nights on Earth will become longer - there will be more time to take a nap before work. But this is not the only consequence. Melting glaciers and changes in gravity will accelerate the movement of tectonic plates and the mantle of our planet, and therefore create new seismically dangerous zones and areas of volcanic activity. Ice influences on the movement of magma in the planet's mantle, and, if it melts, even those places in the depths of the continents where earthquakes - rare, can become seismic.
For example: already now, due to the melting of glaciers in Iceland and Greenland, there is volcanic activity in the adjacent regions increased 20–30 times. In Antarctica are at least 138 volcanoes. Last time they en masse erupted about 18 thousand years ago - and heated the Earth so much that the Ice Age ended. So the ever-memorable Eyjafjallajökull in comparison with them it will seem like just a mountain of burning tires.
The weather will change unpredictably
The disappearance of Antarctica's ice will lead to new weather conditions. How speaks meteorologist at the University of Exeter in the UK, Catherine Bradshaw, the surface of the ice sheet on the continent is very bright and reflects 50-80% of the sunlight falling on it. Where there is no cover, darker soil is exposed. It reflects light less well and therefore absorbs more solar heat.
If Antarctica melts and stops reflecting sunlight, the planet will begin to warm even more. Temperature increase will lead to the fact that wind directions will change and the volume of rain will increase both on the continent itself and throughout the Earth. In addition, due to the fact that a lot of fresh water will enter the ocean, ocean currents will be reoriented - and new unpredictable droughts and hurricanes.
Many animal species will become extinct
Antarctica is often thought of as a cold and lifeless continent, but in fact it is home to a variety of living creatures - penguins, seals, whales and many seabirds. Already, populations of Antarctic animals are declining. Research Australian scientists from the University of Queensland show that by the end of the century, if global warming is not stopped, at least 65% of the species living in Antarctica will simply will go extinct.
A similar fate awaits not only the cold-loving inhabitants of the pole, but also many marine animals in the World Ocean, because the melting of Antarctica will disrupt the water-salt balance, as well as circulation cold and warm currents throughout the planet. Krill and phytoplankton, which are at the bottom of the food chain, will be the first to suffer, and as their populations decline, thousands of species that feed on them will also die.
Antarctica will become green again
About 90 million years ago, Antarctica was already green. Swampy tropical forests like those that now grow in New Zealand flourished on the continent, only they also dinosaurs wandered. For four months these forests dived into the darkness of the polar night, and the rest of the year was illuminated by the bright sun. The average air temperature reached 19 degrees Celsius.
If the ice melts, this land has every chance of becoming covered with vegetation again. Research by Italian specialists from the University of Insubria showthat grasses and mosses in Antarctica, due to global warming, have begun to develop at least five times faster than 50 years ago. In addition, some algae are already manage settle directly on the snow, using feces as fertilizer penguins and other birds.
It is unlikely that Antarctica will again acquire tropical forests, even if it completely melts, but tundras and steppes may well appear there. Most likely, its climate will remind conditions of modern Alaska or Northern Scandinavia. Perhaps the continent can be populated by people.
Of course, farming when the polar night periodically sets in is not very convenient. On the other hand, when more than a third of the planet’s inhabitants will lose their housing due to the World Ocean, which has flooded cities, it is necessary to sort out places for new colonies you won't have to.
And then a new ice age will begin
This is exactly what scientists assume, although, at first glance, it is not clear how global warming can cause global freezing.
Research showthat the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet will disrupt the balance between salt and fresh water. This in turn will force the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reducing the greenhouse effect.
At first this may seem like a good thing, since the greenhouse effect causes global warming. But at a certain point, a change in the balance in the process of CO absorption2 the ocean could serve as a catalyst for a new ice age. Over the past 1.6 million years this happened at least 25 times. In the natural course of things, the next ice age would have occurred after many thousands of years, but due to anthropogenic factors, the cycle has accelerated.
So, if Antarctica does melt, humanity will not enjoy warm days for long. The cold will return and will become more severe. All over the planet.
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