{"id":70436,"date":"2017-06-18T19:02:30","date_gmt":"2017-06-19T02:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/why-did-an-enormous-chunk-of-west-antarctica-suddenly-start-melting"},"modified":"2017-06-18T19:02:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-19T02:02:30","slug":"why-did-an-enormous-chunk-of-west-antarctica-suddenly-start-melting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/why-did-an-enormous-chunk-of-west-antarctica-suddenly-start-melting","title":{"rendered":"Why Did an Enormous Chunk of West Antarctica Suddenly Start Melting?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The researchers think this unseasonably warm air was due primarily to the powerful 2015\u20132016 El Ni\u00f1o. As they write in their paper, the El Ni\u00f1o climate pattern, which starts with high sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, tends to promote the advection of high pressure air masses over this part of Antarctica. But they\u2019re not sure\u2014after all, the comparably-strong 1997\u201398 El Ni\u00f1o event didn\u2019t cause widespread melting in West Antarctica. And although the data points to a correlation between El Ni\u00f1o and melty ice in West Antarctica, that doesn\u2019t necessarily imply causation.<\/p>\n

\n

300,000 square miles is nearly twice the area of California. It\u2019s difficult to visualize a space that vast, but go ahead and give it a try. Now, imagine this California plus-sized chunk of land is covered in thousands of feet of ice. Then, all of a sudden, that frozen fortress becomes a wading pool.<\/p>\n

In January 2016, over the course of just a few weeks, a 300,000 square mile chunk of the West Antarctic ice sheet started turning to slush, in one of the largest melt-outs ever recorded. Scientists with the ARM West Antarctic Radiation Experiment (AWARE), who reported<\/a> the epic defrost in Nature Communications <\/em>last week, believe it was related to the 2015\u20132016 El Ni\u00f1o. Troublingly, they think massive melts like this could be a harbinger of the future\u2014but more research is needed before we can be sure.<\/p>\n

The West Antarctic ice sheet has been called the \u201cweak underbelly\u201d of the Antarctic continent, and for good reason: Its glaciers, which contain enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by at least 10 feet, are shedding mass<\/a> rapidly as the planet heats up. The prevailing wisdom is that warm ocean waters are weakening West Antarctica\u2019s floating ice shelves from below, and causing inland ice sheets to detach from the underlying land surface at their so-called \u201cgrounding line.\u201d But a recent survey<\/a> found evidence for ephemeral lakes and river networks across Antarctica, raising concerns that surface melting could also play a significant role in ice sheet disintegration.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The researchers think this unseasonably warm air was due primarily to the powerful 2015\u20132016 El Ni\u00f1o. As they write in their paper, the El Ni\u00f1o climate pattern, which starts with high sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, tends to promote the advection of high pressure air masses over this part of Antarctica. But they\u2019re [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}