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The Antarctic is a polar region around Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole.
The climate of Antarctica is the coldest on Earth. The continent is also extremely dry, averaging 166 mm (6.5 in) of precipitation per year. Snow rarely melts on most parts of the continent, and, after being compressed, becomes the glacier ice that makes up the ice sheet. Weather fronts rarely penetrate far into the continent, because of the katabatic winds. Most of Antarctica has an ice-cap climate with extremely cold and dry weather.
In glaciology, an ice sheet, also known as a continental glacier, is a mass of glacial ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km2 (19,000 sq mi). The only current ice sheets are the Antarctic ice sheet and the Greenland ice sheet. Ice sheets are bigger than ice shelves or alpine glaciers. Masses of ice covering less than 50,000 km2 are termed an ice cap. An ice cap will typically feed a series of glaciers around its periphery.
The Amundsen Sea is an arm of the Southern Ocean off Marie Byrd Land in western Antarctica. It lies between Cape Flying Fish to the east and Cape Dart on Siple Island to the west. Cape Flying Fish marks the boundary between the Amundsen Sea and the Bellingshausen Sea. West of Cape Dart there is no named marginal sea of the Southern Ocean between the Amundsen and Ross Seas. The Norwegian expedition of 1928–1929 under Captain Nils Larsen named the body of water for the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen while exploring this area in February 1929.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
The Larsen Ice Shelf is a long ice shelf in the northwest part of the Weddell Sea, extending along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula from Cape Longing to Smith Peninsula. It is named after Captain Carl Anton Larsen, the master of the Norwegian whaling vessel Jason, who sailed along the ice front as far as 68°10' South during December 1893. In finer detail, the Larsen Ice Shelf is a series of shelves that occupy distinct embayments along the coast. From north to south, the segments are called Larsen A, Larsen B, and Larsen C by researchers who work in the area. Further south, Larsen D and the much smaller Larsen E, F and G are also named.
The Antarctic ice sheet is a continental glacier covering 98% of the Antarctic continent, with an area of 14 million square kilometres and an average thickness of over 2 kilometres (1.2 mi). It is the largest of Earth's two current ice sheets, containing 26.5 million cubic kilometres of ice, which is equivalent to 61% of all fresh water on Earth. Its surface is nearly continuous, and the only ice-free areas on the continent are the dry valleys, nunataks of the Antarctic mountain ranges, and sparse coastal bedrock. However, it is often subdivided into East Antarctic ice sheet (EAIS), West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), and Antarctic Peninsula (AP), due to the large differences in topography, ice flow, and glacier mass balance between the three regions.
John Alexander Church is an expert on sea level and its changes. He was co-convening lead author for the chapter on Sea Level in the IPCC Third Assessment Report. He was also a co-convening lead author for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. He is a member of the Joint Scientific Committee of the WCRP. He was a project leader at CSIRO, until 2016. He is currently a professor with the University of New South Wales' Climate Change Research Centre.
Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is a large ice stream, and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, responsible for about 25% of Antarctica's ice loss. The glacier ice streams flow west-northwest along the south side of the Hudson Mountains into Pine Island Bay, Amundsen Sea, Antarctica. It was mapped by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from surveys and United States Navy (USN) air photos, 1960–66, and named by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (US-ACAN) in association with Pine Island Bay.
Thwaites Glacier is an unusually broad and vast Antarctic glacier located east of Mount Murphy, on the Walgreen Coast of Marie Byrd Land. It was initially sighted by polar researchers in 1940, mapped in 1959–1966 and officially named in 1967, after the late American glaciologist Fredrik T. Thwaites. The glacier flows into Pine Island Bay, part of the Amundsen Sea, at surface speeds which exceed 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) per year near its grounding line. Its fastest-flowing grounded ice is centered between 50 and 100 kilometres east of Mount Murphy. Like many other parts of the cryosphere, it has been adversely affected by climate change, and provides one of the more notable examples of the retreat of glaciers since 1850.
Timothy Raymond Naish is a New Zealand glaciologist and climate scientist who has been a researcher and lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington and the Director of the Antarctic Research Centre, and in 2020 became a programme leader at the Antarctic Science Platform. Naish has researched and written about the possible effect of melting ice sheets in Antarctica on global sea levels due to high CO2 emissions causing warming in the Southern Ocean. He was instrumental in establishing and leading the Antarctica Drilling Project (ANDRILL), and a Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (2014).
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) lies between 45° west and 168° east longitudinally. It was first formed around 34 million years ago, and it is the largest ice sheet on the entire planet, with far greater volume than the Greenland ice sheet or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), from which it is separated by the Transantarctic Mountains. The ice sheet is around 2.2 km (1.4 mi) thick on average and is 4,897 m (16,066 ft) at its thickest point. It is also home to the geographic South Pole, South Magnetic Pole and the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.
The Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling (CPOM) is a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centre of Excellence that studies processes in the Earth's polar environments. CPOM conducts research on sea ice, land ice, and ice sheets using satellite observations and numerical models.
Between 1901 and 2018, the average sea level rose by 15–25 cm (6–10 in), with an increase of 2.3 mm (0.091 in) per year since the 1970s. This was faster than the sea level had ever risen over at least the past 3,000 years. The rate accelerated to 4.62 mm (0.182 in)/yr for the decade 2013–2022. Climate change due to human activities is the main cause. Between 1993 and 2018, melting ice sheets and glaciers accounted for 44% of sea level rise, with another 42% resulting from thermal expansion of water.
Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions was a conference on Climate Change held at the Bella Center by the University of Copenhagen. The event was organised with the assistance of other universities in the International Alliance of Research Universities. The stated aim of the conference was to provide "a summary of existing scientific knowledge two years after the last IPCC report." The conference took place on 10–12 March 2009.
The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. The existence of the greenhouse effect, while not named as such, was proposed as early as 1824 by Joseph Fourier. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide.
Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities occurs everywhere on Earth, and while Antarctica is less vulnerable to it than any other continent, climate change in Antarctica has already been observed. There has been an average temperature increase of >0.05 °C/decade since 1957 across the continent, although it had been uneven. While West Antarctica warmed by over 0.1 °C/decade from the 1950s to the 2000s and the exposed Antarctic Peninsula has warmed by 3 °C (5.4 °F) since the mid-20th century, the colder and more stable East Antarctica had been experiencing cooling until the 2000s. Around Antarctica, the Southern Ocean has absorbed more heat than any other ocean, with particularly strong warming at depths below 2,000 m (6,600 ft) and around the West Antarctic, which has warmed by 1 °C (1.8 °F) since 1955.
Sophie Marie Jeanne Nowicki, is Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Geology of the University at Buffalo. She does research on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, focusing on their connections to global climate and sea level. Before that, she was physical scientist at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre, investigating ice sheet changes.
Richard Levy is a New Zealand glacial stratigrapher and paleoclimatologist with expertise in microfossil analysis. As a principal scientist at GNS Science he has been involved in international and New Zealand environmental research programmes focussing on the evolution of the Earth's climate and building an understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in causing anthropogenic climate changes, in particular those impacting global sea levels. He has had extensive experience in scientific drilling, leading major projects, including the ANtarctic geological DRILLing (ANDRILL) Program in Antarctica. Since 2018, Levy has co-led the government funded NZ SeaRise programme.
Robert Murray McKay is a paleoceanographer who specialises in sedimentology, stratigraphy and palaeoclimatology, specifically gathering geological evidence to study how marine-based portions of the Antarctic ice sheet behave in response to abrupt climate and oceanic change. He has been involved in examination of marine sedimentary records and glacial deposits to show melting and cooling in Antarctica over the past 65 million years and how this has influenced global sea levels and climate. This has helped climate change scientists overcome uncertainty about how the ice sheets will respond to global warming and how this can be managed effectively in the 21st century. He has participated in international projects including ANDRILL and the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), led major New Zealand government-funded research teams and has received several awards in recognition of his work. Since 2023 McKay has been a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington and from 2019, director of the Antarctic Research Centre.
References
- ↑ "CPOM Website". Archived from the original on 26 May 2007. Retrieved 25 July 2008.
- ↑ The Independent 16 October 1998 – extracted from:Sandra Amos and Richard Boohan; Aspects of Teaching Secondary Science; Routledge ISBN 0-415-26082-5
- ↑ Pelle Neroth Taylor; Natural causes to blame, expert claims ; The Register; 24 February 2005
- ↑ "No. 62866". The London Gazette (Supplement). 28 December 2019. p. N2.