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Melting Ice, Rising Seas: A disaster in making?

There is no doubt everyone is experiencing the effects of climate change in one way or the other.

From the ice melts to incessant rains, droughts to floods, from excessive heat to extreme winters, the events may go on.

We have prefered to call these ‘natural disasters‘ while they are mostly ‘man-made‘.

In 2020, Losing resilience of the planet and dwindling economies gave enough nightmares to the scientists and economists respectively.

Since the pandemic appeared as an enigma, several environmental related repoets have been resurfaced and each one had been equally shocking as well as enlightening.

Increasing climate emergency occurrences

It may make us think that the World is on the brink of a major collapse.

We may have passed the point of no return, affecting weather systems in the Northern Hemisphere and impacting water and ice chemistry in the south.

Changes have never seem to bother humans but the current pace of unprecedented change, is itself questioning.

And among the many induced changes the one that encircles our minds is the Sea level rise as all regions fall vulnerable and affected by this potential killer.

Sea level rise is caused mainly by two factors related to global warming:
1. The surplus water added from melting ice sheets and glaciers
2. The expansion of seawater upon warming.

Bare impacts of sea level rise:

Submerging islands(like Sundar Islands in India) and peripheral-coastal areas devouring coastal communities of its benefits, killer destructive storm surges can push farther inland than they once did and can take more time to die off, more frequently experienced nuisance flooding etc.

Is global sea level same as local sea level?

According to NOAA, Global sea level trends and relative sea level trends are two different measurements.

The sea surface is not changing at the same rate globally. Sea level rise at specific locations may be more or less than the global average due to many local factors: subsidence, upstream flood control, erosion, regional ocean currents etc.

Sea level is primarily measured using tide stations and satellite laser altimeters. Tide stations around the globe tell us what is happening at a local level.

Satellite measurements provide us with the average height of the entire ocean.

The first global ice-loss survey released recently by University of Leeds, found that melting of the ice sheets has accelerated so much during the past 30 years(the Earth lost 28 trillion tonnes of ice between 1994 and 2017 — equivalent to a sheet of ice 100 metres thick covering) that it seems to touch the already set thresholds by our Climate experts.

The study involves the University of Edinburgh, University College London and data science specialists Earthwave and has been published in European Geosciences Union’s journal The Cryosphere.

Although every region we studied lost ice, losses from the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have accelerated the most.

“The ice sheets are now following the worst-case climate warming scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.“, told by a research fellow from the study.

The survey has covered nearly 215,000 mountain glaciers around the planet in varying regions and forms, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans.

It has been found that increased differential heating has played a greater role in Arctic sea ice and mountain glaciers across the globe.

While the rising ocean heat is responsible for the melting of Antarctic ice sheet while oceanic and atmospheric temperatures both have greatly influenced the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice shelves.

Bare evidences of collapsing the Ice world:

1. Ice’s reducing Albedo:
Ice is ultra reflective in nature, therefore reflects some of the solar energy back to space, this keeps its surface cooler. Ice-albedo feedback plays an important role in global climate change assessment.

Albedo commonly refers to the “whiteness” of a surface, with 0 meaning black and 1 meaning white.

However, if warm temperatures continue to decrease the ice cover, the area will be replaced by water or land, decreasing the surface albedo further.

This increases the amount of solar energy absorbed, leading to more warming.

2. Snow water equivalent(SWE):
It is the amount of liquid water in the snow. If you took a height of snow and melted it, the height of the water created is SWE.

It is an important measure of availability of water resources as it indicates the runoff of rivers and variations in groundwater levels by quantifying the available resources.

To track inter-annual changes to land ice, it becomes necessary to monitor seasonal fluctuations in the extent of land covered by snow and in the amount of water stored in the snow. SERVIR-Himalaya helps in this regard.

SWE depends on the amount, depth and density of snow, as well as the age of snow cover.

A few experts have suggested a typical solution as dredging the sand offshore and dump it directly on the eroding beaches into dykes.

This process can then be repeated year after year as the sand washes away.

We also need to preserve all our remaining natural ecosystems intact and not tempering with their sustainability.

Reduction of global warming sources use is like cutting out water to the roots of a plant. We can surely not retreat from this fight, this ailing planet of ours but we can adapt.

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