Climate change wild card: marine ice-cliff instability

On MPR's Climate Cast I've called the rate of ice melt and sea level rise the biggest climate change wild card of this century.

The simple fact is climate scientists just don't know how quickly massive ice fields in Greenland and Antarctica will melt. And the risk of underestimating sea level rise is high.

One emerging area of research? A more catastrophic ice-shelf collapse. It's a scenario may have played out at the end of the last ice age.

Grist writer Eric Holthaus has an eye opening piece looking at the sobering possibility of 6 to 11 feet of sea level rise by 2100 if the process is faster than some scientists currently think.

The glaciers of Pine Island Bay are two of the largest and fastest-melting in Antarctica. Together, they act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans — an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. For that reason, finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today.

To figure that out, scientists have been looking back to the end of the last ice age, about 11,000 years ago, when global temperatures stood at roughly their current levels. The bad news? There’s growing evidence that the Pine Island Bay glaciers collapsed rapidly back then, flooding the world’s coastlines — partially the result of something called “marine ice-cliff instability.”

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