Antarctic Tipping Point That Occurred 8,000 Years Ago Might Happen Again
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February 09, 2024
“We now have direct evidence that this ice sheet suffered rapid ice loss in the past,” said a Cambridge researcher.
As European Union scientists confirmed that last month continued a worrying trend of historically high temperatures, U.K. researchers released a study Thursday warning how fossil fuel-driven global heating could lead to catastrophic and rapid ice loss in Antarctica not seen for thousands of years.
The study, published by researchers at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the University of Cambridge in Nature Geoscience, relies on an ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is over 2,100 feet long.
“We now have direct evidence that this ice sheet suffered rapid ice loss in the past,” said senior author and Cambridge Earth sciences professor Eric Wolff in a statement. “This scenario isn’t something that exists only in our model predictions and it could happen again if parts of this ice sheet become unstable.”
“The very same processes we are seeing just beginning now, in areas like Thwaites Glacier, have played out before in similar areas of Antarctica and indeed, the pace of ice loss was equal to our worst fears about a runaway ice loss.”
Study co-author and BAS researcher Isobel Rowell explained that “we wanted to know what happened to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet at the end of the Last Ice Age, when temperatures on Earth were rising, albeit at a slower rate than current anthropogenic warming.”
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