Good News From Antarctica: Rising Bedrock Could Save Vulnerable Ice Sheet
Jul 02 2018 | 11:04:30
After last week's disturbing news that ice melt in Antarctica
has tripled in the last five years, another study published Thursday
offers some surprising good news for the South Pole and its vulnerable
West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).The study, published in Science
by an international research team, found that the bedrock below the
WAIS is rising, a process known as "uplift," at record rates as melting ice removes weight, potentially stabilizing the ice sheet that scientists feared would be lost to climate change. "The
rate of uplift we found is unusual and very surprising. It's a game
changer," study co-author and Ohio State University (OSU) earth science
professor Terry Wilson said in an OSU press release. The study is good news for coastal dwellers, since the WAIS could cause more than three meters (approximately 9.84 feet) of sea level rise if it collapsed, according to The Independent. Luckily,
as ice melts, weight is removed from the ground beneath it, which
springs up and moves the remaining ice further from the warming water
melting it from below. "This very rapid uplift may slow
the runaway wasting and eventual collapse of the ice sheet," study
co-author and Colorado State University professor Rick Aster told The
Independent."The uplift tends to stabilize the critical
grounding line where the ice sheet loses contact with underlying bedrock
or sediment and goes afloat," Aster said.Researchers
knew removing ice would lead to bedrock uplift, but they thought it
would be a process that would take thousands of years and would not
happen quickly enough to stabilize the ice sheet. Instead,
they measured an uplift rate of 41 millimeters (approximately 1.6
inches) a year, compared to uplift rates of 20 to 30 millimeters
(approximately 0.79 inches to 1.18 inches) a year in Alaska and Iceland,
which are considered fast."We previously thought uplift
would occur over thousands of years at a very slow rate, not enough to
have a stabilizing effect on the ice sheet. Our results suggest the
stabilizing effect may only take decades," Wilson said in the release.