You can hardly make it through a week’s news cycle without someone talking about climate change, rising water levels, and the like.
That said, no matter how dire scientists are able to make it all sound, the actual truth of it is somehow worse.
Specifically, researchers are worried about a chunk of ice larger than the area of Mexico failing to refreeze in the coming cold season.
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Hobbs, a University of Tasmania sea ice scientist, talked about the issue with The Guardian.
“Unprecedented is a word that gets bandied around a lot, but it doesn’t really get to just how shocking this is. It is very much outside our understanding of this system.”
The sea ice in Antarctica typically returns to a predictable rate during cold seasons, but this year, the extent of refrozen sea ice is falling short of predictions – to the tune of around .9 million square miles.
What’s worse? Researchers like Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center are more confused than anything.
“There’s a sense that something weird is going on. It’s dropping way below anything we have seen in our record.”
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Antarctic sea ice has been declining since 2016, and the jury is still out as far as how much human activity is contributing to the coming crisis.
That said, people like Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, say it’s time to ramp up our understanding.
“The Antarctic system has always been highly variable. This current level of variation, though, is so extreme that something radical has changed in the past two years, but especially this year, relative to all previous years going back at least 45 years.”
He continues.
“Since 2016, it’s remained low, and now the bottom has fallen out. Something major in a huge part of the planet is suddenly behaving differently from what we saw for the past 45 years.”
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And if there’s one thing human beings instinctively dislike, it’s change.
Hold on, y’all. I have a feeling the next few decades are going to be a wild ride – possible on a floating country of ice.