Is the Ocean Melting the Ice?

Global sea level rise is one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st Century, and Greenland is central to the problem. That massive ice sheet touches the sea along more than 44,000 kilometers of jagged coastline, and the ice sheet is not just melting from warm air temperatures above; it is also likely being melted from water below.

This mind-boggling study shows just how massive sea level rise really is

As our planet continues to warm, coastlines worldwide will retreat inland — in the long run, maybe by a lot. It seems doubtful that we can defend all of the many coastal zones that will be at risk. But in a new study just out in the open access journal Earth System Dynamics, scientists have actually published an idea for doing that and provided some calculations regarding the scale of what it would take.

Nansen Breaking Up with Antarctica

A floating shelf of ice attached to the coast of Antarctica appears ready to shed an iceberg into the Southern Ocean. Over the course of two years, a small crack grew large enough to spread across nearly the entire width of the Nansen Ice Shelf.