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| Image Source: NYT |
Topics: Climate Change, Environment, Geophysics, Weather
Note: The climate that has changed is that of Antarctica, at least in the physical sense.
"Antarctica Animals -South Polar. Antarctic animals - The most abundant and best known animals from the southern continent. Penguins, whales seals, albatrosses, other seabirds and a range of invertebrates you may have not heard of such as krill which form the basis of the Antarctic food web." Source: Cool Antarctica.
As in the Arctic, the loss of essentially land mass cannot be good for hunting and spawning patterns, thus the normal continuation of species that would inevitably affect the food chain, that we are inexorably a part of. The nominal excuse of using the warmed climate as "good sea lanes" for shipping fossil fuels doesn't hold water here, as far as I know. A Native American proverb (attributed to many Nations) comes to mind:
"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money."
Alanis Obomsawin (born 31 August 1932) is a Canadian filmmaker of Abenaki descent born in New Hampshire, and raised primarily in Quebec; she has produced and directed many National Film Board of Canada documentaries on First Nations culture and history. Source: Wikiquote
A chunk of floating ice that weighs more than a trillion metric tons broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula, producing one of the largest icebergs ever recorded and providing a glimpse of how the Antarctic ice sheet might ultimately start to fall apart.
A crack more than 120 miles long had developed over several years in a floating ice shelf called Larsen C, and scientists who have been monitoring it confirmed on Wednesday that the huge iceberg had finally broken free.
There is no scientific consensus over whether global warming is to blame. But the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula has been fundamentally changed, according to Project Midas, a research team from Swansea University and Aberystwyth University in Britain that had been monitoring the rift since 2014.
“The remaining shelf will be at its smallest ever known size,” said Adrian Luckman, a lead researcher for Project Midas. “This is a big change. Maps will need to be redrawn.”
An Iceberg the Size of Delaware Just Broke Away From Antarctica, Jugal K. Patel and Justin Gillis, New York Times
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