South Pole Episode 12: Ice Sheet Melt and Sea Level Rise
In this episode of South Pole, we learn about sea level rise with Dr. Heiko Goelzer, an expert in ice sheet modeling at the Norwegian Research Center, to explore the dynamics of Antarctica's ice sheets and their contribution to rising sea levels. The conversation delves into the differences between ice sheets, ice shelves, sea ice, and icebergs, while addressing the potential 57-meter sea-level rise if all Antarctic ice melted. Dr. Goelzer explains the complex climate tipping points related to ice sheets and the future scenarios of climate change. The episode offers insights into the latest research on ice loss and how it might affect global coastlines, while emphasizing the urgency of addressing climate change.
Episode Guest: Dr. Heiko Goelzer
Find more on Dr. Goelzer here.
Browse Dr. Goelzer’s publications on Google Scholar.
Sea Level Rise Projection Reports:
Sea Level Rise Projection Tools
YouTube video explaining total Antarctic ice sheet melt
Episode Transcript and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website
Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia
Hosted, produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese
Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong.
Theme music by Nela Ruiz
Transcript:
[00:00:09.600] - Clark
Hello, and welcome to another episode of South Pole, the podcast that explores everything Antarctica. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and today we are talking about Antarctica ice sheets, melting, sea-level rise, and what that could mean for us. All right, welcome to the show. This episode, we will tackle ice sheets, another one of the many ice words that we have touched on so far. But we are also going to tackle quite a pressing issue when people think of Antarctica and climate change together, how much ice will melt and how much sea level will rise as a result. We will dig into this today. We will also clarify, again, the differences between ice sheets, ice shelves, sea ice, and icebergs for anyone who needs a little bit of a refresher on that. And we will dig into the concept of climate tipping points in Antarctica. Our guest today that's going to help walk us through all of this is named Dr. Heiko Gonsler, a researcher specializing in ice sheet modeling and climate projections at the Norwegian Research Center. There, he focuses on how ice sheets contribute to future sea-level rise and climate dynamics. Without further ado, let's get started.
[00:01:29.920] - Clark
All right. Hello. Welcome, Dr. Goelzer. Welcome to the show. The first question I have for you is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your research.
[00:01:44.440] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Okay, thanks. My name is Heiko Goelzer. I'm a researcher at the Norwegian Research Center in Bergen, in Norway. My research interest is on ice sheets and how they contribute to sea level and how they did contribute to sea level in the past. The way that I'm addressing the question of how ice sheets evolve and how they contribute to sea level, I do that with models, with computer models.
[00:02:09.260] - Clark
Okay. I don't know too much about computer models, but I've talked to a couple of people who do. And one thing they've taught me is that they run on large amounts of data. So what kinds of data do your models analyze?
[00:02:21.990] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Well, the most important data sets that I'm leveraging are remote sensing data sets because they cover basically the entire ice sheet. So when we talk about Antarctica, it's also very difficult to get there in the first place. So a lot of the field-based data is focusing on specific locations where it's more easy to get to. So there's typically a combination of field-based data that are specific to a location, and then generalizing over a larger area with remote sensing data sets that are either satellite-based or flown with planes.
[00:02:57.530] - Clark
I'm also curious because I know that you work with data comes out of the Arctic or the Northern Pole side of things as well. So are you noticing the same sorts of phenomena between the North Pole and the South Pole or any differences in how these two polar regions are behaving?
[00:03:12.190] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
So the Greenland ice sheet, that's what we're talking about. And I mean, just to clarify, this is not on the North Pole. The North Pole is ice covered, but the ice that is covering the North Pole is swimming on the ocean water. We call it sea ice. It's only a few meters thick. And so what I'm busy with is land-based ice. So ice that is covering an entire continent and draping over the landscape like a sheet. That's why it's called an ice sheet. It's still very thick, so it can be like several thousand meters thick. And currently, we only have two of those on the planet. So one on Greenland, on the island of Greenland, which is about 10 times smaller than the Antartic Irish sheet on the Antartic continent. In physics, they are the same. I mean, there is just ice sitting on the continent. The climatic settings are quite different. So in Greenland, it's a bit warmer, and that makes that in the summer, you have a considerable melt at the margins. You lose mass by runoff, like the water melts at the surface and then runs off to the ocean. Whereas in Antarctica, most of the mass loss is happening in solid form.
[00:04:24.730] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
You have basically the ice because it's so cold, the ice is flowing into the ocean where it builds so-called ice shelves that is basically ice swimming on the water. Then from that, occasionally, you have this iceberg carving events where ice is ejected into the ocean as icebergs and then drifting around until eventually it melts. That's roughly the difference between the two settings.
[00:04:50.640] - Clark
Okay. You mentioned the term mass loss, which I want to circle back to. But first, maybe it's actually worth doing a quick rundown of all the different ice where it's both for the listeners and for myself We learned about them on season one with Dr. Elin Darelius, who studies ice shells. But can you refresh our memory on the differences between all these different ice words?
[00:05:08.360] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Okay. An ice sheet, as I said, is like a layer of ice draped over a continent. And then when it flows into the ocean, the ice sheet is then called an ice shelf. So the ice shelf is if you want the floating extension of an ice sheet. But sometimes we call, just summarize the Antarctica the ice sheet as sheet and shelf because it's hanging together. Sea ice is a completely different thing because this is formed by predominantly freezing of ocean water. So this has a very strong seasonality. It comes in the winter and goes away in the summer, mostly. And it's really not my domain of research. That's really related to the ocean and the ocean water. What did we miss? Icebergs. Okay, the iceberg is something that It comes off of a glacier or an ice sheet. The glacier or the ice shelf is in contact with the ocean water, and when there's ice falling off of it, it falls into the water and swims in the water until it melts. I think these were the ones you wanted to know, right?
[00:06:16.740] - Clark
Yes, I think we got them. It's interesting for a layperson like me, when we think of ICE, we think ICE is ICE, right? But then as soon as you talk to a researcher who focuses on one particular form, these vocabulary words start to become quite important. Now, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is because you are involved in a research action group called IMS, which is part of SCAR, so lots of acronyms which listeners will start to become more familiar with as time goes on. But SCAR is the Scientific Committee on Antarctic research. I saw on the ice mass web page, which is a Body Underneath SCAR, a sentence that said that there is 57 meters of potential sea-level rise locked up in the ice sheets of Antarctica. First, can you tell us a little bit about this research group, ice mass, and then help us make sense of that sentence.
[00:07:04.990] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Okay. First about the initiative. Sca is a huge international program that is concerned about all different aspects of Antarctica, not just the ice or the sea level, but also about the biology that you find there, the politics of Antarctica, political situation, and all of these things. But under SCA, there's different action groups and different scientific sub organizations that address specific scientific questions. ISMASS stands for Ice Sheet Mass Balance and Sea Level. It is a relatively small group that is concerned about this question of how do ice sheets contribute to sea level? Then we get to this number of 57 meters. The way that an ice sheet works is basically that you have snowfall in the center of the ice sheet that replenishes it, and then that snow is compacted into ice, and then under its own weight, the ice deforms and flows to the margin, where in the Greenland case, it would typically melt away in the summer. And then in Antarctica, it flows building ice shelves and carving icebergs into the ocean. And this balance between Mars deposited and mass being removed determines if the ice sheet is gaining or losing mass overall. And over millions of years, the ice sheet on the Antartic continent has gained a substantial mass of ice.
[00:08:28.870] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
And when you would If you melt all of this ice at once and distribute the resulting meltwater over the entire ocean area, you would raise sea level by 57 meters. So this is how we measure the potential of that ice sheet and how much it could contribute to sea level if it was all melted. That's where the number comes from.
[00:08:50.840] - Clark
Okay, so we're going to talk about what 57 meters of sea level rise would actually mean for us. I did a bit of digging after the interview, and I'll share what I found at the end of the episode. But as you mentioned, the snow replenishes the ice sheet, and you were describing this cycle that comes with the seasons. And I'm wondering if it's meant to equalize in a sense, or that in a stable climate system, there's a bit of a balance. And then the size of the ice sheet either grows or shrinks over time. If this ice cycle, if we can call it that, is not balanced. Is that a good way of understanding it?
[00:09:22.620] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Yeah. So ice sheets have different time scale of response. But on the very long time scale, the ice sheet tries equilibrate with the climate. So for a given, let's say, temperature, to make it simple, there's also precipitation, like how much snow is falling. But if we only stick to temperature for the moment, for a given temperature, the ice sheet can take a certain size. And if the climate is more or less stable, then the ice sheet arranges itself to be in balance with that climate, which means that the same amount of ice or snow is deposited as melts at the margin. Then when you bring that climate out of a balance, so you make it warmer, for instance, Then the ice sheet loses mass and evolves to a state which is smaller, which is adjusted to that new climate state, to that new warmer climate state. And so in that transition, which may take 100,000 years to be reached, so to be clear, 102,000 years, not 100,000 years, then the ice sheet is again in a balance. But on the way to that balance, of course, it loses mass, and that mass has to go somewhere, and it goes into the ocean and contributes to sea level rise.
[00:10:29.100] - Clark
Okay, got it. And then when the ice sheets get smaller, as I understand, we call this mass loss. Does this concept of mass loss translate to sea level rise?
[00:10:39.390] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Well, additional mass loss leads to sea level rise. Because you can... I The ice sheet is losing mass all the time to the ocean, but then there's a replanishing so that water from the ocean is evaporated, forms clouds, makes more snowfall, and that eventually falls back on the ice sheet. So it's the balance between the two. You could change the mass of the ice sheet by melting more. You reduce the ice sheet size or mass. What we also see in the future, for instance, is we know in our projections that it is getting warmer, so you expect more melting and more mass loss. But at the same time, when it gets warmer, the atmosphere is capable of holding more moisture in it. And so that makes that you actually get more snowfall at the same time as you get more melting. And depending on the relative importance of this process, you could have that the ice sheet is somehow compensated by increased snowfall or the melt that it has because of the warming.
[00:11:39.440] - Clark
Okay, so it's about net positive mass loss would result in sea level rather than just the process of mass loss alone working in this balanced system.
[00:11:47.460] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Exactly. Yeah.
[00:11:49.340] - Clark
Then I guess my next question would be, what is going on with that system? Are we seeing a net positive trend of mass loss? We know the climate is warming, right? Is that something we can detect already or see in the data?
[00:12:02.870] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Yeah. Observed is that over the last decade, Antarctica, the Antarctica sheet was losing mass. This is mainly through dynamic processes at the margin. This is not a signal of snow what is called increase or decrease. It's really that there's more mass going into the ocean, which is not completely or is not compensated fully by what is falling in the sand.
[00:12:24.930] - Clark
Are we able to quantify how much that mass loss has added to sea level at this point?
[00:12:29.730] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Yeah. So maybe here I have to open another box, which is that when we talk about this 57 meters, this is equally spreading out the water over the ocean. But in reality, there's different mechanisms, different processes happening that make this distribution of the water is not equal. So in our slang, this is called relative sea level change. So instead of this mean sea level change that you would get by just making the simple calculations, 57 meters distributed all over. In fact, the mastos from the Antartic ice sheet has so-called fingerprint, which leads to different changes all over the globe. In some places, you have a sea level rise. In some places close to the ice sheet, you actually have a sea-level fall, which is related to the gravitational attraction of the ice sheet that it has on the water.
[00:13:20.150] - Clark
Oh, that's fascinating. I did not know that.
[00:13:22.590] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
And so when we say sea level is changing, in my world, they're being concerned mostly about the large-scale ice sheets, we are happy with this one number. But in reality, and especially when you want to pass this information on to practitioners that actually have to make decisions on how close to the Coast we're built in the infrastructure, how high do I raise the sea defenses. For those people, it's very important to know not only this global number, but to know the region or local sea level change. And that's different in different locations.
[00:13:56.810] - Clark
Are we able to predict where the sea will rise more or less, if you will?
[00:14:00.430] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
So this, let's call it, fingerprint of that mass loss is something that is possible to calculate. I mean, there's also always uncertainties on it, but that's a calculation one can make. There's different things going into that. So the first place is gravitation. So when you lose mass from the andactic ice sheet, then you lose also gravitation and traction to the sea water around it. So in close proximity to where you lose the ice, you actually have sea level fall. And in the far field, so that's everything a few hundred kilometers away, you would have sea level rise. Then there's more details on the rotational, the Earth is rotating. And when you change the mass distribution on the Earth, also the rotation changes, and so you get a signal from That's all. There's a whole lot of complexity in there. But the sea level that you actually measure in places is still typically within, let's say, 20% of that global number. You get a very good Earth's approximation from that mean sea level change number. But then, as I said, if you are interested to building a new infrastructure somewhere or you need to protect a city against sea level rise, then you need these more precise numbers.
[00:15:14.270] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Maybe to go back to one question you asked before. Do we know how mass loss translates to sea level? That's something that we can calculate quite well, this translation, because it's a mass redistribution. What is much harder to determine is how much mass we will actually lose because this depends on the climate scenario that we as a world community choose to be on. We can only project what's happening in the future with models, and they have biases, they have errors or uncertainty that we have to take into account. So that's much more difficult.
[00:15:54.990] - Clark
Okay, that's actually a perfect transition into talking about models to project into the future of how the Earth will respond to climate change. First, let's quickly get a grasp of these models. In my layperson understanding of what a model is, it's basically aggregating as much data as you can and then manipulating as many different variables as you can possibly think of that might affect a certain Earth process, and then moving the scale up or down on those variables and whatever combination you would like to look at what any given circumstance would result in. Is that how models work?
[00:16:28.120] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Yeah, okay. I guess that would be The way that I would formulate it is that fundamentally, you try in a model, it's basically a computer program. And what you try to do is to solve mathematical or physical equations. And in order to solve these equations, you typically have to solve them on discrete points. So what we do is when you think of the Earth or you think of the Antartic ice sheet, then we separate, let's say, the ice sheet into different grid points on which we can make these calculations. And then for each of these good points, we solve these equations. And that, in principle, allows us to simulate things that happened in the past, things that are happening now, and also things that are happening in the future. When we know, let's say, what the forcing is, what excites that system, what drives the system, then we can make projections or make estimations of what is going to happen.
[00:17:24.940] - Clark
Okay. So for example, you could use these computer programs, these models, to make a projection for how the Antartic the ice sheet would respond to 1.5 degrees warming versus 2 degrees warming versus 5 degrees warming, etc.
[00:17:36.030] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So these different climate scenarios is what we as ice sheet modelers, would use as an input. So Some climate modeler presents us with this data set which tells us where and when temperature is changing. And there's other variables. And there's also precipitation. There's different things that go into our models. But this would allow us then to To impose that as an outside forcing and as an external forcing on the ice sheet model and then project what is happening with that ice sheet.
[00:18:08.100] - Clark
I think it's time for another vocabulary word, tipping point. Maybe I'll ask us if you can tell us what that means as it applies to ice sheets and also how we can use these models to identify them?
[00:18:17.940] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Okay, that's a very complex problem, but I will start very simple. So it is recognized that in some dynamical systems, there are transition points where you move from one particular dynamical behavior to a quite different one. And this point of transition, we call the tipping point. Maybe the easiest example one can think of is a seesaw where you have a ball on top and you roll that ball slowly into the middle. And as long as you stay away from the middle, the ball always rolls back to you. Let's say you're on the seesaw on the low side of the seesaw, you roll the ball up and it always comes back to you. But when the ball rolls over the middle, then the seesaw swings over and the ball ends up on the other side. And so that would be in that very simple case, that would be the tipping point where you move from one maybe known behavior of the system to one that you have not seen before. The problem is that some Earth system elements have been shown to exhibit tipping behavior, meaning that there's two or more distinct climate states that the system is in.
[00:19:30.180] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
The fear is, let's say, that these tipping points could be activated. So we are now operating in an Earth system that has dramatically changed because it's warming up by our activities. And the question is, do we remain with that system in a safe operating space away from these tilping points, or do we move some of these elements into a point where there's abrupt changes to something else? And when it comes to the ice sheets, the typical question you could ask is, is in a warmer climate that the ice sheet is still feasible? We talked about this equilibration process before. So is in a five-degree warmer world still placed for an ice sheet or not? And it's pretty clear for the Greenland ice sheet that it would not survive five degrees. It would take very long time for the ice sheet to disappear. But in a five-degree warmer world, the ice sheet cannot be maintained, let's say. And so in that sense, on the very long time scale, that represents a tipping element because we know that when we go above a certain threshold and wait long enough, the ice sheet will disappear.
[00:20:40.390] - Clark
Okay, that's a bit alarming. But are there any specific tipping points that we're keeping our eye on with these Antartic ice sheets?
[00:20:48.920] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Yeah. So the Antartic ice sheet, maybe quickly saying. So some people say Antartic ice sheets because there's often a separation made between the West Antartic ice sheet and the East Antartic Ice Sheet and the East Antartic Ice Sheet. Physically speaking, it's all just one big ice mass, but they are dynamically quite different because the East Antartic Ice Sheet, the bigger part, is mostly land-based and therefore less vulnerable also to oceanic warming, whereas the West Antartic Ice Sheet is predominantly in contact with the ocean, meaning that the ice has grown so far out that it is what we call grounded below sea level. So you have ice sitting in contact with the ocean under the ocean water line. And that makes it particularly susceptible for when the ocean temperature is changing. And so in a warmer world where the ocean is considerably warmer, most of this ice that is in contact with the ocean now will be lost. And so the Western Arctic ice sheet has about five meters sea-level equivalent of this total of 57. And we think that in a much warmer world, let's say five degree warmer world, all of this ice will certainly go.
[00:21:58.940] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
When I say it will go, It can still take hundreds of years to disappear. Just to make this clear, this is not something that happens from one day to the next, and maybe not even on the time scale of our individual human experience.
[00:22:13.540] - Clark
Do you know if we're on a current track to trigger any of these tipping points?
[00:22:18.040] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
So, yeah, there's conflicting scientific results. Some of them point to that we have already crossed some of these tipping points, and others say that we are close to them in, let's say, temperature space. So I would say that's still an open scientific debate. And what is important to notice that we like to simplify this often and say, okay, there's a tipping point for the entire ice sheet. But in fact, the ice sheet is fringed by different ice shelves. And each of these individual ice shelf systems, of course, they all hang together. But each individual one could be reaching a tipping point or not reaching a tipping point. So it's important to be clear about that. There's, for instance, one glacier in West Antarctica, which may have already reached the tipping point. It's not entirely clear. But then we're talking about this specific glacier. The neighbor, Thwaites Glacier, is one that has a relatively large potential sea-level contribution. If that should be destabilized. And that can also behave as a tipping element. But this has not been triggered yet as far as I understand it. But as I said, there's still debate about that in the scientific community.
[00:23:35.460] - Clark
So there's multiple different tipping points, some of which are attached to specific physical or geographic features. But passing one tipping point, though may not be so devastating as 57 meters of sea level rise can push us closer to the edge of another tipping point. What I'm hearing is we need to continue monitoring a bunch of different spaces. It might have been implied, but we need to say it anyway. I'm also hearing that we need to seriously curb our emissions straight But it seems like, and tell me if I'm wrong, there isn't one specific course of action or policy that can be implemented to directly preserve the ice sheets. The only way to preserve them is to basically meet our general climate goals to prevent warming past a certain point.
[00:24:15.530] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
With ice sheets, fundamentally, the problem is very clear. If it gets too warm, the ice sheets don't like it. And because the ice sheets are so big, even small changes in the ice sheet on their scale, it can mean a lot for us. So if, for instance, That if we tab into only one meter of sea-level rise from these 57 that sit there, potentially, this makes a big difference for humanity because there's billions of people living close to the Coast, and a meter of sea-level rise is a huge one for most of these coastlines. So in that sense, keeping the temperature globally down or trying to prevent a large warming is definitely the right strategy. Okay.
[00:24:56.070] - Clark
Well, we are going to start to round out the conversation. And a couple of questions I'd like to ask the end, one of which is, is there anything that we missed today that you think is essential to talk about in a discussion about ice sheets on either one of our polls?
[00:25:09.340] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
I mean, there's a lot of things to talk about. Yeah. I mean, there's big questions about For instance, should we intervene with the climate other than trying to reduce our emissions? Keyword geoengineering. Is that something that we do as a last resort? That could be a whole discussion in itself. But no, I think we covered the most important aspect.
[00:25:32.880] - Clark
Is geo engineering a solution to mass loss, something that you think is viable?
[00:25:37.760] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
I think in my understanding, the scale of the problem is so tremendous that it's very difficult to imagine engineering solutions that could substantially alter the problem. At the moment, I think of them more as quick fixes, and I have not really seen something that convinced me as a feasible technology. So that's more on the feasibility side. Other than that, there's this big problem that it may buy us more time, but fundamentally, we have to solve that climate crisis by reducing emissions and moving to a more sustainable way of producing energy. And if we now throw at politicians the idea that we have these engineering solutions that can fix it, we may miss on the big question that's really to be solved. That's my personal opinion on that. This is a hot discussion. On any conference I go to, this is a big part of our discussion now. How do we deal with this?
[00:26:40.270] - Clark
Okay, I found an article from the World Economic Forum that proposed some projects that are so large in scale that they would involve creating fake islands to hold the ice sheets in place. Or I found one that proposed building a giant wall to block warm water from coming into contact with the ice sheets. I saw another one that wanted to put a giant pump below the ice sheet that would act as a refrigerator to refreeze the water that was melted. This one isn't particularly connected to mass loss, but I've heard of some proposals to make giant fake ice sheets or ice shelves that are white and enormous to bounce more radiation from the sun back out of our atmosphere. So the idea of that would be to slow global temperature rise. Despite being extremely expensive, extremely intensive, and albeit imaginative, they are probably more closer to bandage than long-term solutions. Well, also, we've been talking about sea-level rise and climate change, which tend to give people a fair bit of anxiety. In an effort to remain optimistic because I think optimism is the key to action. Is there one piece of good news that's come out of your field of research recently that you can share with us?
[00:27:47.340] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
But no, I think for me, the positive in this difficult situation we're in now is that whatever we do as positive change really has an impact in any situation. It You can always make it better. This is what keeps me positive about seeing what is happening is that there's not a point where you say, Okay, now we totally lost it. Now we're doomed. This point doesn't exist.
[00:28:15.040] - Clark
I think that's really important to remember, right? Especially because it seems like we might not be able to maintain that 1.5-degree target, at least the way things are headed right now, unless something very big changes very quickly. But all that means is that we just have to hit our next Exactly. This is the part where I would like to say thank you so much for taking your time to come on the show and to teach us about ice sheets. And thank you so much also for your important research in this space.
[00:28:41.250] - Dr Heiko Goelzer
Yeah. Thanks for the invitation.
[00:28:55.210] - Clark
A major thank you to Dr. Heiko Gonsler. And I know I I've literally just tried to end the episode on a note of optimism, but I am going to tell you what to expect if Antarctica melts. Now, there are two purposes to this, right? First, I'll tell you what's going to happen if all of the ice in Antarctica melts, which, as Dr. Goelzer explained, if that happens, it won't be for many, many hundreds of years. It's just to gain an appreciation for how much ice there is. Then after that, I'll tell you what we can expect to be dealing with if as much ice melts as scientists are currently expecting by the end of the century, if we continue with the current levels of emissions. Okay, first. If all of the ice in Antarctica melts, it would lead to quite catastrophic consequences globally. The complete melting of the Antarctica ice sheet would result in sea-level rise, about 57 meters as we discussed, which is about 200 feet. What that would look like It would be the submerging of coastal cities worldwide. It would displace hundreds of millions of people, and it would cause significant ecosystem disruptions.
[00:29:53.110] - Clark
Here's a list of cities that will be underwater. I'm just going to talk about North America, but I'll post a YouTube video in the show notes that explains how this would impact each continent. Okay, with North America, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, they'd all be underwater. Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland would also be gone. Charleston, most of Florida. The interesting thing, it's not just going to impact the coastal cities, but it would also spill into the Mississippi River Delta and up the Mississippi River, causing flooding throughout the center of the United States as well. Yeah, New Orleans also gone. On the other side, San Francisco, San Diego, LA, gone. Up to our northern neighbors, Montreal, Vancouver, are also gone. This is not just being a little bit underwater. We're talking about whales being able to swim next to the Statute of Liberty. It's pretty significant. Most of the world's population lives in major cities on the Coast. Cuba would become an archipelago instead of one large island, and most of the Bahamas and the Caribbean would be gone. These are literally entire nation states, right? Another thing to be aware of is that the level of the sea or the height of the water would not be the only issue.
[00:30:59.310] - Clark
If If all of the ice in Antarctica melted, the fresh water that would be released into the ocean would rearrange ocean currents. It would affect global weather patterns, and it would potentially make some regions uninhabitable due to extreme heat, droughts, or flooding. The melting It will also release vast amounts of trapped carbon, exacerbating further disruptions to our climate systems. This is pretty bad, but as we mentioned, that's not necessarily happening anytime soon. But just to get an appreciation for how much ice is there and how much the Earth would look, not like anything it looks like today, right? Now, onto our current path of climate change by the end of the century. Scientists have estimated by 2100, and I'll put some links to sources in the show notes. I found a couple of different ones. Climate The NEOA published that by the end of the 21st century, on a high emissions trajectory, we might see as many as 2.2 meters of sea-level rise by 2100. Now, according to the NOAA report from 2022, NOAA being the National Oceanographic and Atmispheres Administration, we could see as many as 10 to 12 inches in the next 30 years.
[00:32:06.130] - Clark
And that's still significant. Coastal areas would experience a lot more frequent and severe flooding. It would impact infrastructure and economies. Additionally, the melting could disrupt global ocean currents and weather patterns, even with that 10 to 12 inches, intensifying storms and droughts. Some low-lying regions, particularly small island nations, would face extreme threats due to rising seas and storm surges. As I said, you can find some more information about this in the episode description. I'll also include some links to some online tools that basically function as a sea-level rise simulator where you can tinker with that if you're curious. But all of this to say is that climate change is very real and the consequences are increasingly imminent We have to act and put pressure on your legislatures all the time, wherever you can. I guess that's just something we have to keep saying. All right, I think that is all for you today. I want to thank everyone who's made it this far, and we'll chat soon. You've been listening to South Pole. You can find more information about this week's guest and links to their work in the episode description. Cover art for this show was done by Laurel Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Nila Ruiz.
[00:33:19.350] - Clark
I am your host, Clark Marchese and this episode was produced and engineered by me. So if you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. South Pole is part of a larger network of sciencey podcast called Pine Forest Media. We've got one on plastic, one on drinking water, and a couple of new ones coming out soon. You can find more information about us in the episode description as well or on our website at pineforestpods. Com. We're also on Instagram and TikTok at Pineforest Media. If you love the show and you want to support science communication like this, a five-star rating across platforms and a review on Apple Podcasts is one of the best things you can do to help us reach more people and for the entire network to grow. All right, thank you to everyone who has made it this far, and we'll talk soon.
