Giant Antarctic Icebergs and Crushing Existential Dread
I went to Antarctica 20 years ago, and I didn’t care about ice shelves. I noticed one at last when the blinding white of the ice, struck up against an abidingly black ocean, made me understand at last why the penguins all around me and the orcas occasionally surfacing a few dozen feet away had the same basic color scheme. Evolution ain’t stupid.
But evolution isn’t smart, either, or we humans would be much better at perceiving patterns without such obvious visual clues. Like, when a 1.1 trillion-ton, 2,200-square-mile piece of ice breaks off of the Antarctic Peninsula—the fiddly spit-curl in the upper left1 of most maps of the continent—we might be able to see it not just as megasized glaciological action but as yet another piece of the global weirdness, increasing in magnitude and frequency, that tells us Earth is getting hotter, the seas are rising, and we are all in trouble.
Alas, no.
On its own, a massive iceberg unconsciously uncoupling from the Larsen C ice shelf won’t raise sea levels along the world’s coastlines—the newly-calved iceberg was already floating. Researchers from the UK-based Project Midas have been watching the region for decades and expected the break-up; they were there to be supportive just as they were when Larsen A split in 1995 and Larsen B collapsed in 2002. (Some peninsulas just fear commitment.)
Michael Brune, Sierra Club
Hey, the break-up might not have even been due to climate change. “Although this is a natural event, and we’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change, this puts the ice shelf in a very vulnerable position,” said Martin O’Leary, a glaciologist at Swansea University, in a Project Midas statement. But even if climate change didn’t make Larsen C fall off, it will make the potential consequences that much worse. “This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history,” O’Leary continued. “We’re going to be watching very carefully for signs that the rest of the shelf is becoming unstable.”
In 1997, over two weeks in Antarctica—a few days at McMurdo Station, a couple days at the old South Pole Base, and a few more days in the McMurdo Dry Valleys—I was much more interested in reporting on the place as an analog for an alien landscape. I went looking for microbes that could live without water for months at a time. I watched technicians bore into ice to install strings of glass balls like Christmas ornaments that could detect tiny blue flashes of Cherenkov radiation caused by subatomic neutrinos passing through the continent. Talk of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet and various glacial rivers bored the hell out of me, to be honest. As usual I chased things that sounded like science fiction—only true.
So it’s appropriate, I guess, that it took science fiction to explain why I was being a dope back then. Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel New York 2140 is set in a flooded, Venetian Manhattan—catastrophic sea level rise having been induced by the failure of all the various ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica, which in turn allowed all that other ice that carapaces the continent to slide into the warming seas. Oh, says me! That’s why we’re supposed to care about ice shelves.
Yet we still kind of don’t. Even if climate change didn’t send Larsen C packing, the air and oceans on Earth are incontrovertibly warmer than they used to be. That makes it less likely that the Larsen ice will ever bulk up again, and the newly exposed shelf even more vulnerable to the lapping sea. Might this calving galvanize action to fight climate change? “The only appropriate answer is, who knows? It’s been less than a day,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “I don’t think people are stupid. I think they recognize there’s a broad, systemic change happening. What used to be an esoteric concept is now something that hits home, literally.”
The question is, can an event like Larsen C move a policy needle? What makes something into a focusing event that opens a policy window, or even just a teachable moment that might shift the positions of the 25 percent of Americans whose opinion on climate change ranges from “meh” to “conspiracy?” “This particular event is very important from a climate science perspective,” says Tony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. "But it’s happening within a very complicated political-economic-cultural landscape where there are already well-entrenched positions, where different audiences exist, and where people will either hear about or not hear about this because of their different media sources or networks.”
Scientists, activists, and journalists all tend to race for the existentially dreadful bottom at times like this. It’s a little ironic, considering that just a few days ago a New York magazine article charting Earth’s impending climatic doomsday took heavy fire from climateers themselves, who, like apologetic wingmen and -women for a drunken friend at a party, quickly tried to minimize the damage. It probably won’t be that bad, it might never be that bad, there’s still time to fix this. In this field, tradition demands a certain restraint when you’re pitching doomsdays—as Elizabeth Kolbert named it in the New Yorker, erring on the side of least drama.
- Nick Stockton
Map Shows Where Sea Level Rise Will Drown American Cities
- Chelsea Leu
Britain's Antarctic Research Station Looks Like a Spaceship
- Alexa Kurzius
The Break in the Larsen Ice Shelf Is Bad for the Planet, But Huge for Science
Related Stories
Is banging a climatic-disaster drum about Larsen C’s viking funeral “dramatic?” Maybe. I can handle the cognitive dissonance of simultaneous apocalyptic despair and hope because of upward spikes in hybrid automobile sales, wind and solar energy, and lots of civilized countries agreeing to cut greenhouse gas emissions. “All responsible scientists are saying, look, there are some very serious impacts coming our way, but we do still have choices, and let’s act on those,” says Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and climate policy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This is not just gloom and doom. This is a moment that should galvanize us to action, and we should push our policymakers to take those actions.”
Inland from the ice shelves, in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, the Austral summer turns bits of glaciers into transient meltwater ponds. In these rocky, shallow pools, tiny bubbles of microbes lurch, temporarily, back to life. No matter how frozen some Earthly biome may seem—a pond near Seuss Glacier or a Capitol—a little sunshine always has a chance to spark a miracle.
1 UPDATE 7/13/17 3:40 PM Corrected to reflect the correct map placement
Related Video
Science
King Tides Show Us How Climate Change Will Threaten Coastal Cities
Seawall-topping king tides occur when extra-high tides line up with other meteorological anomalies. In the past they were a novelty or a nuisance. Now they hint at the new normal, when sea level rise will render current coastlines obsolete.