Study: Burning all fossil fuels could melt Antarctica

2015-09-13 2015-09-13T08:46:00Z

ArabiaWeather.com - A recent study showed that burning all fossil fuel reserves in the world could melt the entire Antarctic ice cap and raise global sea levels by more than 50 meters over thousands of years.

A melt like that, which would also wipe out Greenland's much smaller ice sheet, is the worst case of climate change, inundating cities from New York to Shanghai and changing maps of the world, with water covering most of the Netherlands, Bangladesh or Florida.

The scientists said in the journal "Science Advances" that "burning the fossil fuel resources that can be obtained at the present time is enough to eliminate the ice sheet (of the Antarctic region)."

The Antarctic region contains ice equivalent to a rise in sea levels of 58 meters. Even current emissions of oil, coal and natural gas could make the West Antarctic ice sheet unstable if it persists for 60 to 80 years, they said. This represents only between six and eight percent of fossil fuel reserves.

"What we do now could change the face of the Earth for the next millennium," senior study author Ricarda Finkelmann of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany told Reuters. France will host a summit meeting of about 200 countries from November 30 to December 11 to discuss ways to combat Climate change, to some extent by switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

The study estimated that imposing limits on emissions to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius could limit sea level rise in the long term to a few metres. Sea levels have risen about 20 cm since 1900.

"If we don't stop getting our carbon dioxide waste into the atmosphere, the Earth that now has more than a billion people living on it will one day be under water," Ken Calderia, one of the study's authors from the Carnegie Institution of America, said in a statement.

The US National Weather Service said that the melting of a large amount of Antarctica is far away, even with the high rates of temperature. On Friday, the temperature in Antarctica reached minus 71 degrees Celsius.

But Finkelman said that the flow of ice toward the ocean could eventually reduce the thickness of the ice, which is about 2,700 meters at the pole, exposing the surface to much higher temperatures.