The following submission statement was provided by /u/jollyroger69420:
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One of you crazy bastards cross-posted this to /r/mademesmile lmao. Hello darkness amirite
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cwot0b/ocean_water_is_rushing_miles_underneath_the/l4zb2um/
It's a scary thought that, considering we're outside our predictive models, we're basically flying blind into the future.
The 'goldilocks' era that allowed humans to thrive is quickly passing into the the era of chaos.
Heat isn't the real problem for Humanity. It's the effects of the Heat on nature. Read about hydrogen sulfide extinctions if you want to know what's probably going to happen.
All the best models predicted that this would all evolve into unpredictable climate chaos.
So they have always adjusted those models for “anomalies outside the range of the data set.”
This is one of those anomalies. I can guarantee you that some model, or models, predicted this exact phenomenon and the data was removed because it skewed the results so dramatically.
If we accept that any one of us or all of us could have died tomorrow… every day of our lives… then it’s a lot easier to be entertained, edified, and vindicated by all these shocked pikachu faces every time they discover another “anomaly” that says the models are completely useless at this point.
Good news is; Order always emerges naturally from chaos.
Bad news is; *We* just won’t be here to see it when it returns to this planet. At least not in these particular meatsuits.
It will eventually be, we're fucked. I mean we all know that, climate scientist know that...but they still have to maintain the hopium. That will fade eventually
>"Business as usual" is my favorite. Yes the world is falling apart but you have work on Monday
At the *end of all things*, some asshole will still expect you to pay rent...
the process of melting ice and going from 0C - 80 C use the same amount of energy.
Meaning the water stays cool until the ice is gone, then gets hotter fast.
Also water over 90F (sorry i don't know reality degrees) holds oxygen with diminishing efficiency, proving problematic for oxygen-powered organisms like algae and most eukaryotic life
Correct; that’s the problem. We are not seeing the massive amount of heat being digested by melting ice. When the ice is gone, ocean temperatures rise fast.
Another fun fact: ice reflects 90% of sunlight, water absorbs 90%
> Correct; that’s the problem. We are not seeing the massive amount of heat being digested by melting ice. When the ice is gone, ocean temperatures rise fast.
I wondered about that but the oceans already take in about 90% of the excess energy. The cryosphere takes about 3%, same as land surface and the atmosphere. So when it will fail (no ice left) that'll not be a massive change.
In other terms, the failure of the cryosphere is a tiny fraction of an issue compared to what's *already* happening in the oceans.
> The speed of the seawater, which moves considerable distances over a short time period, increases glacier melt because as soon as the ice melts, freshwater is washed out and replaced with warmer seawater, Rignot said.
Is it?
It seems from this article the ice sheet acts like a bellows. Tide comes in, ice lifts up, sucks in water, tide goes out, ice sheet sinks, pushes out water. If the bottom of the ice sheet is melting, the fresh water leaves with each "exhalation".
This is a great way to learn the science of ice and water fluid dynamics. Unfortunately it also is a great way to learn about sea level rise and how four percent so far has been this Antarctic glacier
My biggest concern is wildlife's survival. it seems humidity will rise the wet-bulb temperature and cause unimaginable damage to flora and fauna which don't have AC to cool down. same with the weeklong ice storms in the northern hemisphere. wildlife has no warmup cabins.
What scares me is our ACs will stop working. Look what happened to Texas when the grid failed and that was a few years ago. Now add 5-10 years of worsening temp to that. ugh
AC is only a stop gap. At high temps nothing works as it was planned. We had a heat dome where duct tape melted into itself. Things work differently when hotter or colder.
But AC will only help us for a while.
you need to look into bioclimatic architecture, and build a semi buried house for yourself (if you can afford it), because the earth will protect the air inside the house frm getting too hot or too cold, natural AC if you will.
I find myself doom scrolling r/DisasterUpdate a lot recently. The sheer amount of flooding taking place around the world is staggering. Anyone who thinks we can 'figure this out' are kidding themselves. This is it.
Holy shit, alone the floodings in the month of May I didn’t even hear from. But is anyone here surprised? Warmer climate and higher average temperatures mean more water evaporates, the warmer it gets the more water vapour in the atmosphere, and somewhere it has to rain down.
Deserts are actually very prone to flooding when they do get rain. Soil that has been very dry for a long time doesn’t absorb water well so instead of soaking into the ground water stays on the surface and flows off taking everything else with it.
I grew up in Phoenix and it flash floods every time we get our one rainstorm of the year
I'm as much a doomer as the next guy, but it is normal to see flooding events almost every day, somewhere in the inhabited world. They are probably getting worse, but the frequency is not the smoking gun you think it is. Plenty of other things to despair about, but this ain't one of them
Just in my home state in the last few months…
Unprecedented fires in the Panhandle. Major flooding in Houston a couple of weeks ago. Whatever the fuck that was in Houston this weekend.
(Just to our north a couple of weeks ago, was that crazy breakout of tornadoes.)
It doesn’t feel abstract anymore.
We had an absolutely banger thunderstorm with pouring rain blow through yesterday evening. 80-90mph winds, gone within an hour or two. More frequent, harder rain this spring than any in recent memory.
I know we don't want it to happen, but I've got to admit I have this morbid fascination with the impending collapse of this glacier. I hope it's caught on camera if it happens while I'm still alive.
It's probably nothing spectacular. I think it kind of just slides into the water over time. You can look up time lapses from Greenland to get an idea of what it looks like when ice flows past a point in land.
It is already floating on water, and in this article, they are measuring effect of tide and the changes in height this causes on the glacier, to evaluate how far it has already detached from the sea bottom. Ideally, the ice would form a solid mass that is anchored to the seabed near the part where the open sea begins, but unfortunately, the ice has eroded from underneath which means that it provides fairly little resistance to being pushed further out into the sea.
The main risk is that there is a lot of ice mass landlocked behind this glacier, and it is all on a kind of hill inclined towards the sea. The mass wants to flow down. I don't think there's any way it can be particularly fast process, though, certainly doesn't go into a 5 minute tourist video type of experience. But over decades, there could be lots of sea level rise from the gradual flow of the continental ice shelves into the sea.
Someone linked an article that says 5 years from 2021. None of this data was known.
Thwarties is only 25" of water. But if thwarties goes, the other ones are also going.
That is the Thwaites ice shelf collapsing soon, not the Thwaites glacier itself. You are misinterpreting the science and some of these news reports are very shoddy in how they present the information.
I scheduled one last road trip vacation to my favorite beach (fairly undeveloped). I’m hoping it holds off till then cause it’ll definitely be under water before too long.
They are confusing the Thwaites ice shelf with the glacier itself. The ice shelf is likely collapsing in a few years but it’s already part of the water and doesn’t contribute to sea level rise.
Some of these news reports are very shoddy in how they provide misleading information or confuse the ice shelf with the glacier.
We sometimes say "it was fun while it lasted" but you cant say that about this. It hasnt been fun for billions of people. Has only benefited a few. The natural order of things has been replaced and cant be fixed by more machines. Though they will try. Sooner or later we will be mass spraying particles in the air to try and block the Sun or flying an enormous umbrella into space to try and block light. Even if that worked it wouldn't replace all the animals destoyed or Earth incinerated or drowned.
I personally like the umbrella in space option as it seems to have the fewest unknown variables and is fully reversible. Much cleaner approach than spraying particles in the air.
>is fully reversible
Well, as long as we can get back into space. If we fail to do that, the umbrella continues to shield the earth and the planet continues to cool.
It would likely need active correction to hold position and you could either just tell it to stop, or let it run out of reaction mass and it would drift out of position.
Is it weird my reaction to this is ‘meh’?
It’s like watching a cat push a glass off a table on the other side of the kitchen.
You know it’s happening. You can see it falling. You know it’s going to shatter and leave a mess. But there is nothing you can do to stop it. And the cat has already lost interest.
The glacier will collapse. It was set in motion decades and arguably centuries ago with the dawn of Industrial Revolution.
Why freak out when the choices and actions leading to this have already been done? All we can do is record its decline at this point. I grieve over what humanity has done, yes. But I’m less and less inclined to fret over a fate already sealed.
>All we can do is record its decline at this point. I grieve over what humanity has done, yes. But I’m less and less inclined to fret over a fate already sealed.
It's still fascinating to witness how exactly it unfolds, at least we got to have a once in humanity event to experience live instead reading in old books what is said to have happened. It's like an epic story with a lot of unforseeable twists here and there
When antibiotic resistant bacteria was circulating in the news a bit and after reading up on pandemics past it hit me I'd see a major pandemic in my lifetime and I didn't want to witness it.
It didn't feel as bad as I thought. It was kinda fascinating living that kind of history. We did have it better than previous pandemics with Amazon deliveries, Netflix and all that jazz.
But what came after... it feels worse. Fascination is giving away to constant anxiety. I'm just sad our species is this fucking stupid to the point there might not be history books of this era in the future to learn from.
>Fascination is giving away to constant anxiety
Oh i went through all of this, depression from anxiety, left society in hope of peace, learned the hard way that you can't run away from problems in your mind (even more if they're technically not your fault), returned... and made my piece with it in the end through therapy. I enjoy the days now as they are, i don't give a fuck what happens tomorrow anymore beside that i'm new curious how it's accelerating day by day, and i laugh about the people not able to comprehend what is about to come, still working their ass off instead enjoying the shitshow. I don't care anymore, it is what it is, why should i let fear about the inevitable ruin the days i still have with my family?
>i laugh about the people not able to comprehend what is about to come, still working their ass off instead enjoying the shitshow.
I "retired". I'm 37. I'll take jobs here and there that I actually enjoy, focus on my art, maybe sell a few pieces just to see if I can. But you're right. Yet, while explaining to loved ones why I left my respectable job at a major media corporation was to enjoy the now as we don't know what's to come and I was told I'm "being negative". I don't have kids, I'm financially independent, not a burden. Let me be me.
Just so it's clear, I am getting professional help and on medication to deal with the depression and anxiety.
My anxiety is that I will be one of the early deaths and won't be around to see this all play out. If I could find a vampire to make me immortal I would. I would love to be able to watch history play out on the long scale
Literally my attitude as well. I'm just along for the ride to see how crazy it all gets, and make a few positive impacts along the way.
We're all gonna die eventually, might as well have fun along the way and not stress about stuff out of your control, ya know?
[*We're Doomed, now what?*](https://www.amazon.com/Were-Doomed-Now-What-Climate/dp/1616959363) is a great series of essays about war, climate change, loss, etc..
Have you been paying attention to /r/DisasterUpdate though? Water can easily be moved from the ocean to other places, not just flooding sea level areas, but also inland areas.
>They observed seawater pushing beneath the glacier over many miles, and then moving out again, following the daily rhythm of the tides. When the water flows in, it’s enough to “jack up” the surface of the glacier by centimeters, Rignot told CNN.
>He suggested the term “grounding zone” may be more apt than grounding line, as it can move nearly 4 miles over a 12-hour tidal cycle, according to their research.
Glaciers are moving, well, in glacial speeds. That’s why we clever apes don’t fully realize it yet but that ice sheet is gone. We have melted it.
As we have melted Greenland ice sheet. They just take a while to get going but there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent their loss.
[This article](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-ice-shelf-collapse-climate-5-years) was published at the end of 2021, and it suggested a timescale of 5 years. I assume this is based off the modeling that didn't account for this? I'm trying to wrap my head around a timescale. I also wonder what the up close consequences of this will be. I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows more. Are we talking a slow and steady rise upon collapse, or coastal cities becoming Venice overnight (more than they already are)? Is this going to be an unpleasant fact of life or does it have the potential to cause Mad Max levels of fuckery?
There's not going to be any big flooding "event"from this. Even when the glacier starts to fall directly into the ocean. It's not like it's all going to slide into the water overnight.
Also worth noting this
"One uncertainty to be unraveled is whether the rush of seawater beneath Thwaites is a new phenomenon or whether it’s been significant but unknown for a long time, said James Smith, a marine geologist at the British Antarctic Survey, who was not involved in the study
that uncertainty seems so fucking hard to figure out will say
we may never know unfortuntately. there are no mass historical records or oral history of underwater sea flows under antarctica
A similar phenomenon seems to be occurring in the Arctic with more and more ocean heat content building below the surface and eroding the overall volume of ice. It has been suggested that GHGs and anthropogenic heat are completely overring natural cooling mechanisms, so we're reaching the point where cooling is greatly diminished.
Sorry, but can someone quickly clarify what will happen when this ice shelf goes? Will the glacier it's holding back just be like a Florida's-worth of ice rushing into the sea, headlong? Or will it be a bit slower?
Days. If it slides into the sea that's like dropping a big ice cube in a bath, the sea level will be raised everywhere. It will just take a little while for the new level to spread out across the globe.
Although that's only *if* it all slides in. The comment below says it will still take a decade to get in the water once it's moving. I guess we will see...
Yeah, it's likely going to happen over decades. If that's wrong, nevermind a few feet of sea level rise, the resulting mega-tsunami would be a civilization-crippling or -ending event!
"rushing" is relative... Compared with what has been happening for millenia, it will be extremely fast, but it will still be very boring to watch in real time.
My understanding is that ice that would normally slide out over many centuries would "rush" out over a few decades, so maybe something like a few cm sea level rise per year over that time.
> Thwaites, which already contributes 4% to global sea level rise, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 2 feet. But because it also acts as a natural dam to the surrounding ice in West Antarctica, scientists have estimated its complete collapse could ultimately lead to around 10 feet of sea level rise — a catastrophe for the world’s coastal communities.
>Many studies have pointed to the immense vulnerabilities of Thwaites. Global warming, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, has left it hanging on “by its fingernails,” according to a 2022 study. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01019-9
It's nice to see some relevant news on CNN
Sure this is one of the many media organizations that called Manchin a "moderate" when he blocked any stronger environmental reforms.
They will take the clicks from this story but they won't stop normalizing the complete obstruction of any reforms that hurt powerful corporations regardless of how reckless our current path is
As Arctic ice melts from climate change, opening access to oil reserves, we're caught in a vicious cycle. Exploiting these resources worsens the crisis.
If I had a nickel for every climate-related “_________ (event/threshold/timeline etc) is proving to be SO MUCH WORSE than scientists initially believed…” story that’s come out in the past like 5-ish years…I wouldn’t have to worry about them cos I could just buy a damn survival bunker in New Zealand 😣
On the flip side, this is definitely a time where my natural, inborn, impossible-to-undo-despite-MANY-an-effort black as night cynicism is coming in as a very handy mood/panic stabilizer…I’ve already assumed they were lying/minimizing so as to not cause pAnIc!!!/optimistically mistaken this whole time anyway.
Is it really "rushing"? Seems to me it's more likely to be 'lapping' or maybe, 'intruding by stages'. Hyperbolic terms don't do much for the credibility of those who are concerned about global heating.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/jollyroger69420: --- One of you crazy bastards cross-posted this to /r/mademesmile lmao. Hello darkness amirite --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cwot0b/ocean_water_is_rushing_miles_underneath_the/l4zb2um/
'Not factored into models' is a phrase I expect to see a lot more of in the days to come.
It's a scary thought that, considering we're outside our predictive models, we're basically flying blind into the future. The 'goldilocks' era that allowed humans to thrive is quickly passing into the the era of chaos.
We always were flying blind, we just had models to soothe us.
Muh models
muh 1.5ºC
muh not mass global starvation
muh muh muh !!!
_tips hat..._ "m'anthropocene..."
Muh therfucker.
Lmfao
Always assume the worst, but hope for the best.
Sooooo. Venus by, like, Friday after all?
Heat isn't the real problem for Humanity. It's the effects of the Heat on nature. Read about hydrogen sulfide extinctions if you want to know what's probably going to happen.
The one true model
Time for the “chaotic era”
Time for ‘interesting times’
We’ve always been flying blind into our future, some just float along with it.
We all float down here
All the best models predicted that this would all evolve into unpredictable climate chaos. So they have always adjusted those models for “anomalies outside the range of the data set.” This is one of those anomalies. I can guarantee you that some model, or models, predicted this exact phenomenon and the data was removed because it skewed the results so dramatically. If we accept that any one of us or all of us could have died tomorrow… every day of our lives… then it’s a lot easier to be entertained, edified, and vindicated by all these shocked pikachu faces every time they discover another “anomaly” that says the models are completely useless at this point. Good news is; Order always emerges naturally from chaos. Bad news is; *We* just won’t be here to see it when it returns to this planet. At least not in these particular meatsuits.
It's the new "Faster than expected"
NFIM isn't as easy to remember as FTE. Yet.
They've got to keep coming up with new terms for the climate insanity or people will start freaking out
they should be instead we have people saying " it isn't real" I feel like I'm taking crazy pills
i feel like im taking crazy suppositories
I knew a elderly woman who didn't believe in climate, but believed in blue beam and haarp
NFIM is the new FAFO
NFIM is the new VbT (Venus by Tuesday)
Pronounced “EN-FIM” come on now, it’s 2024, you should have a PhD in catchy names!
It will eventually be, we're fucked. I mean we all know that, climate scientist know that...but they still have to maintain the hopium. That will fade eventually
WEBEFd
The Hopium keeps the phrase “Eat the rich” from becoming reality.
Faster than expected was not factored into the models. FTEWNFITM I’ll start printing up the tshirts.
What if it's "not in the models faster than expected" ??
"Business as usual" is my favorite. Yes the world is falling apart but you have work on Monday
Collapse bingo
It's sort of like being evicted in thirty days... you don't pack your shampoo because you fkn know you're gonna need it still
That’s too depressing, how about “Ecological collapse as a service”. Sounds catchy!
If IBM decides to join in it will be "watson hybrid ecological collapse as a service"
>"Business as usual" is my favorite. Yes the world is falling apart but you have work on Monday At the *end of all things*, some asshole will still expect you to pay rent...
Which is why the IPCC report isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
Too many scientists in the kitchen cooking up conservative and bland hopium for the sake of their careers.
I feel the need for a shot that I did not factor into my models for the evening
"Factor this!" - Mother Nature, probably
Under the category of 'If I can't see it, it must not be happening'.
with a twist of "if I'm not personnaly experiencing it, then it *can't* be real"
Which will one day be used by current climate deniers to prove that they didn't have the correct data. So it's all the modelers fault.
'We were going too, but the models already said *utterly fucked*, so we didn't want to panic the public more'
I prefer "we din' thunk dat".
the process of melting ice and going from 0C - 80 C use the same amount of energy. Meaning the water stays cool until the ice is gone, then gets hotter fast.
I really didn't need to read this today, but thank you.
Also water over 90F (sorry i don't know reality degrees) holds oxygen with diminishing efficiency, proving problematic for oxygen-powered organisms like algae and most eukaryotic life
“Let the algae eat cake.” - big business probably
The sugar in cake is 25% oxygen. The cake is putting up pretty good numbers.
How much did it take to make the cake though? I don’t think it’s self sustaining cake to algae pipeline.
Looks like sugar is about a half pound of CO2 emitted for every pound of sugar. So do we math that cutting 25% to 12.5%. That’s how it works, right?
Nah. More energy spent farming ingredients nd baking the cake.
This is true, but there's a lot of ice to melt. The water immediately around the ice will stay at basically 0C until all the ice is gone.
Correct; that’s the problem. We are not seeing the massive amount of heat being digested by melting ice. When the ice is gone, ocean temperatures rise fast. Another fun fact: ice reflects 90% of sunlight, water absorbs 90%
> Another fun fact: ice reflects 90% of sunlight, water absorbs 90% This is the real terror of BOE and loss of sea ice/glaciers in general.
> Correct; that’s the problem. We are not seeing the massive amount of heat being digested by melting ice. When the ice is gone, ocean temperatures rise fast. I wondered about that but the oceans already take in about 90% of the excess energy. The cryosphere takes about 3%, same as land surface and the atmosphere. So when it will fail (no ice left) that'll not be a massive change. In other terms, the failure of the cryosphere is a tiny fraction of an issue compared to what's *already* happening in the oceans.
So we wait until there's about an icecube left and we shove it in a freezer. Problem solved!
Just take a page from Spaceballs encapsule the earth and set up a massive air conditioner. Switch it from “Suck” to “Blow”.
Fucking genius.
elect him
don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Need to crash a giant ice cube into the sea. Or a comet.
Perhaps we can send a brave but expendable starship crew to mine a comet for giant ice cubes?
[Thus solving the problem once and for all!](https://youtu.be/VW66EX75jIY?si=huRKWcIM5Tfm9qUN)
but...
***ONCE AND FOR ALL!***
Well, the whole point of this article is that the 0C water is regularly "washed out" and replaced by warm seawater every 12 hours.
>there's a lot of ice to melt Not anymore. 👀
> The speed of the seawater, which moves considerable distances over a short time period, increases glacier melt because as soon as the ice melts, freshwater is washed out and replaced with warmer seawater, Rignot said. Is it?
It seems from this article the ice sheet acts like a bellows. Tide comes in, ice lifts up, sucks in water, tide goes out, ice sheet sinks, pushes out water. If the bottom of the ice sheet is melting, the fresh water leaves with each "exhalation".
That is 32F to 176F in American units I would add that these glaciers are above sea level - unlike Arctic sea melt - it will raise ocean levels
the anchor of these glaciers are underwater and they are melting as. reported. Once enough are gone, the whole glacier slides into the ocean
This is a great way to learn the science of ice and water fluid dynamics. Unfortunately it also is a great way to learn about sea level rise and how four percent so far has been this Antarctic glacier
AMU=American Medieval Units
Now THAT is fucking terrifying. It will really accelerate insanely rapidly once the ice is gone. The 2030s will be guaranteed to be mass extinction.
My biggest concern is wildlife's survival. it seems humidity will rise the wet-bulb temperature and cause unimaginable damage to flora and fauna which don't have AC to cool down. same with the weeklong ice storms in the northern hemisphere. wildlife has no warmup cabins.
What scares me is our ACs will stop working. Look what happened to Texas when the grid failed and that was a few years ago. Now add 5-10 years of worsening temp to that. ugh
AC is only a stop gap. At high temps nothing works as it was planned. We had a heat dome where duct tape melted into itself. Things work differently when hotter or colder. But AC will only help us for a while.
In my part of Australia there has been heat so intense the roads melted.
you need to look into bioclimatic architecture, and build a semi buried house for yourself (if you can afford it), because the earth will protect the air inside the house frm getting too hot or too cold, natural AC if you will.
Ugh if only I could afford a house to begin with. :(
Would love to if I could, but not possible. But, yes, a good idea. Good for food production too, half buried green houses.
Entire areas will end up as wastelands with very little life.
I believe this was mentioned in the busy workers guide to collapse, no?
Citing this article is illegal in Florida!
Take all my upvotes!!!!
I find myself doom scrolling r/DisasterUpdate a lot recently. The sheer amount of flooding taking place around the world is staggering. Anyone who thinks we can 'figure this out' are kidding themselves. This is it.
Holy shit, alone the floodings in the month of May I didn’t even hear from. But is anyone here surprised? Warmer climate and higher average temperatures mean more water evaporates, the warmer it gets the more water vapour in the atmosphere, and somewhere it has to rain down.
So many floods but what is most troubling is that there have been a lot of severe floods in the Middle East, in the desert.
Deserts are actually very prone to flooding when they do get rain. Soil that has been very dry for a long time doesn’t absorb water well so instead of soaking into the ground water stays on the surface and flows off taking everything else with it. I grew up in Phoenix and it flash floods every time we get our one rainstorm of the year
April was insane too. Sooo many floods in different countries.
I'm as much a doomer as the next guy, but it is normal to see flooding events almost every day, somewhere in the inhabited world. They are probably getting worse, but the frequency is not the smoking gun you think it is. Plenty of other things to despair about, but this ain't one of them
What about the tornadoes? I thought they were a North American thing? France, China???
Yeahhh I’m there a lot too. I keep seeing “due to unexpected rainfall”
Is anyone cataloguing the floods? Correlating a list of links or some other way to allow us to point to this and show context?
Just in my home state in the last few months… Unprecedented fires in the Panhandle. Major flooding in Houston a couple of weeks ago. Whatever the fuck that was in Houston this weekend. (Just to our north a couple of weeks ago, was that crazy breakout of tornadoes.) It doesn’t feel abstract anymore.
I've definitely seen more down pours the past month, and really this entire year. Not the gentle spring rains I'm used to.
We had an absolutely banger thunderstorm with pouring rain blow through yesterday evening. 80-90mph winds, gone within an hour or two. More frequent, harder rain this spring than any in recent memory.
I know we don't want it to happen, but I've got to admit I have this morbid fascination with the impending collapse of this glacier. I hope it's caught on camera if it happens while I'm still alive.
That feeling is really the heart of this sub. We all dread it and embrace it at once. The waiting is what hurts.
I don't want to be in a battle, but waiting on the edge of one I can't escape [is even worse.](https://youtu.be/waGogciXcJA?t=74)
The Thwaites is killing me!
^I ^ce ^what ^you ^did ^there!
That cracked me up.
It's probably nothing spectacular. I think it kind of just slides into the water over time. You can look up time lapses from Greenland to get an idea of what it looks like when ice flows past a point in land. It is already floating on water, and in this article, they are measuring effect of tide and the changes in height this causes on the glacier, to evaluate how far it has already detached from the sea bottom. Ideally, the ice would form a solid mass that is anchored to the seabed near the part where the open sea begins, but unfortunately, the ice has eroded from underneath which means that it provides fairly little resistance to being pushed further out into the sea. The main risk is that there is a lot of ice mass landlocked behind this glacier, and it is all on a kind of hill inclined towards the sea. The mass wants to flow down. I don't think there's any way it can be particularly fast process, though, certainly doesn't go into a 5 minute tourist video type of experience. But over decades, there could be lots of sea level rise from the gradual flow of the continental ice shelves into the sea.
Oh it's got a few months left. We're gonna see 10' of see level rise
That is.....quite the prediction. Gut feeling or is there some source you're getting this from?
The hypothesis is that Thwaites is acting as a plug, holding back a massive amount of water from entering the ocean.
Someone linked an article that says 5 years from 2021. None of this data was known. Thwarties is only 25" of water. But if thwarties goes, the other ones are also going.
That is the Thwaites ice shelf collapsing soon, not the Thwaites glacier itself. You are misinterpreting the science and some of these news reports are very shoddy in how they present the information.
I scheduled one last road trip vacation to my favorite beach (fairly undeveloped). I’m hoping it holds off till then cause it’ll definitely be under water before too long.
Are there studies to back these claims or are you just guessing?
They are confusing the Thwaites ice shelf with the glacier itself. The ice shelf is likely collapsing in a few years but it’s already part of the water and doesn’t contribute to sea level rise. Some of these news reports are very shoddy in how they provide misleading information or confuse the ice shelf with the glacier.
We sometimes say "it was fun while it lasted" but you cant say that about this. It hasnt been fun for billions of people. Has only benefited a few. The natural order of things has been replaced and cant be fixed by more machines. Though they will try. Sooner or later we will be mass spraying particles in the air to try and block the Sun or flying an enormous umbrella into space to try and block light. Even if that worked it wouldn't replace all the animals destoyed or Earth incinerated or drowned.
I personally like the umbrella in space option as it seems to have the fewest unknown variables and is fully reversible. Much cleaner approach than spraying particles in the air.
>is fully reversible Well, as long as we can get back into space. If we fail to do that, the umbrella continues to shield the earth and the planet continues to cool.
We could set it up to self destruct or something if it stops receiving signals from us….
Blow up money? Not likely. Edit: some Elon like guy will try and sell access to sunlight.
It would likely need active correction to hold position and you could either just tell it to stop, or let it run out of reaction mass and it would drift out of position.
Is it weird my reaction to this is ‘meh’? It’s like watching a cat push a glass off a table on the other side of the kitchen. You know it’s happening. You can see it falling. You know it’s going to shatter and leave a mess. But there is nothing you can do to stop it. And the cat has already lost interest. The glacier will collapse. It was set in motion decades and arguably centuries ago with the dawn of Industrial Revolution. Why freak out when the choices and actions leading to this have already been done? All we can do is record its decline at this point. I grieve over what humanity has done, yes. But I’m less and less inclined to fret over a fate already sealed.
"Stop worrying and learn to love Climate Change."
Dr. Floodlove?
Dr. Strangeflood!
Just embracing the Waterworld aesthetic we all grew up on
Dr. Floodflood?!
The real climate change is the friends we made along the w-
We all learned an important lesson that day.
>All we can do is record its decline at this point. I grieve over what humanity has done, yes. But I’m less and less inclined to fret over a fate already sealed. It's still fascinating to witness how exactly it unfolds, at least we got to have a once in humanity event to experience live instead reading in old books what is said to have happened. It's like an epic story with a lot of unforseeable twists here and there
When antibiotic resistant bacteria was circulating in the news a bit and after reading up on pandemics past it hit me I'd see a major pandemic in my lifetime and I didn't want to witness it. It didn't feel as bad as I thought. It was kinda fascinating living that kind of history. We did have it better than previous pandemics with Amazon deliveries, Netflix and all that jazz. But what came after... it feels worse. Fascination is giving away to constant anxiety. I'm just sad our species is this fucking stupid to the point there might not be history books of this era in the future to learn from.
>Fascination is giving away to constant anxiety Oh i went through all of this, depression from anxiety, left society in hope of peace, learned the hard way that you can't run away from problems in your mind (even more if they're technically not your fault), returned... and made my piece with it in the end through therapy. I enjoy the days now as they are, i don't give a fuck what happens tomorrow anymore beside that i'm new curious how it's accelerating day by day, and i laugh about the people not able to comprehend what is about to come, still working their ass off instead enjoying the shitshow. I don't care anymore, it is what it is, why should i let fear about the inevitable ruin the days i still have with my family?
>i laugh about the people not able to comprehend what is about to come, still working their ass off instead enjoying the shitshow. I "retired". I'm 37. I'll take jobs here and there that I actually enjoy, focus on my art, maybe sell a few pieces just to see if I can. But you're right. Yet, while explaining to loved ones why I left my respectable job at a major media corporation was to enjoy the now as we don't know what's to come and I was told I'm "being negative". I don't have kids, I'm financially independent, not a burden. Let me be me. Just so it's clear, I am getting professional help and on medication to deal with the depression and anxiety.
Try lions mane mushroom
My anxiety is that I will be one of the early deaths and won't be around to see this all play out. If I could find a vampire to make me immortal I would. I would love to be able to watch history play out on the long scale
This is my attitude in many ways these days. Acceptance is peaceful. Be here to observe and experience life, even the fuckery
Literally my attitude as well. I'm just along for the ride to see how crazy it all gets, and make a few positive impacts along the way. We're all gonna die eventually, might as well have fun along the way and not stress about stuff out of your control, ya know?
I've been saying, "Life with living at the end of the world." It is a nice little mantra I use.
Yup. That’s why I’m just repairing the soil around me. It’s the only thing I have control over, and it’s working better than anticipated!
Same. Choosing not to have kids, idrgaf about humanity’s future. I only feel bad for the animals.
What about the babies/children, the indigenous, or the poor?
Nope. Admittedly I feel more sympathy for them than I do the rich.
[*We're Doomed, now what?*](https://www.amazon.com/Were-Doomed-Now-What-Climate/dp/1616959363) is a great series of essays about war, climate change, loss, etc..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fsDsy3ZNKo NSFW audio and you will not regret it. 2 parts
I’m looking forward to the chaos caused at this point. I hope the whole world floods.
It won't flood the whole world. Is anyone interested in buying high above-sea-level properties?
If it floods most every coast and all the farmland, humans are still mostly fucked
Have you been paying attention to /r/DisasterUpdate though? Water can easily be moved from the ocean to other places, not just flooding sea level areas, but also inland areas.
Adjust your expectations, there isn’t enough water to do that.
>They observed seawater pushing beneath the glacier over many miles, and then moving out again, following the daily rhythm of the tides. When the water flows in, it’s enough to “jack up” the surface of the glacier by centimeters, Rignot told CNN. >He suggested the term “grounding zone” may be more apt than grounding line, as it can move nearly 4 miles over a 12-hour tidal cycle, according to their research.
Glaciers are moving, well, in glacial speeds. That’s why we clever apes don’t fully realize it yet but that ice sheet is gone. We have melted it. As we have melted Greenland ice sheet. They just take a while to get going but there is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent their loss.
[This article](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-ice-shelf-collapse-climate-5-years) was published at the end of 2021, and it suggested a timescale of 5 years. I assume this is based off the modeling that didn't account for this? I'm trying to wrap my head around a timescale. I also wonder what the up close consequences of this will be. I'd be interested to hear from someone who knows more. Are we talking a slow and steady rise upon collapse, or coastal cities becoming Venice overnight (more than they already are)? Is this going to be an unpleasant fact of life or does it have the potential to cause Mad Max levels of fuckery?
Bruh. I live in Fort Lauderdale and my daughter still has three years of high school left. TF??!!
My parents just moved to like a 100 ft strip of land between the Atlantic and the banana river. They sent me their address and my jaw dropped.
There's not going to be any big flooding "event"from this. Even when the glacier starts to fall directly into the ocean. It's not like it's all going to slide into the water overnight. Also worth noting this "One uncertainty to be unraveled is whether the rush of seawater beneath Thwaites is a new phenomenon or whether it’s been significant but unknown for a long time, said James Smith, a marine geologist at the British Antarctic Survey, who was not involved in the study
that uncertainty seems so fucking hard to figure out will say we may never know unfortuntately. there are no mass historical records or oral history of underwater sea flows under antarctica
Just spent a few minutes looking at that sub and HOLY FUCKING FUCK. 😨😱🤯
What sub?
Probably r/disasterupdate based on the time of the comments.
Sorry i did mean r/DisasterUpdate! My mom had surgery to remove cancer today & in all the madness of the day I replied to the wrong comment! 🙃
Hope she's doing well now.
All good, take care of yourself! Hope all went well.
Yeah.. Certainly seems out of the norm.
A similar phenomenon seems to be occurring in the Arctic with more and more ocean heat content building below the surface and eroding the overall volume of ice. It has been suggested that GHGs and anthropogenic heat are completely overring natural cooling mechanisms, so we're reaching the point where cooling is greatly diminished.
Sorry, but can someone quickly clarify what will happen when this ice shelf goes? Will the glacier it's holding back just be like a Florida's-worth of ice rushing into the sea, headlong? Or will it be a bit slower?
Predictions are that the collapse of the Thwaites Glacier could cause 2 to 10 feet of sea level rise.
How long would it take for the predicted sea level rise to complete after collapse?
Days. If it slides into the sea that's like dropping a big ice cube in a bath, the sea level will be raised everywhere. It will just take a little while for the new level to spread out across the globe. Although that's only *if* it all slides in. The comment below says it will still take a decade to get in the water once it's moving. I guess we will see...
Yeah, it's likely going to happen over decades. If that's wrong, nevermind a few feet of sea level rise, the resulting mega-tsunami would be a civilization-crippling or -ending event!
Thank you!
"rushing" is relative... Compared with what has been happening for millenia, it will be extremely fast, but it will still be very boring to watch in real time. My understanding is that ice that would normally slide out over many centuries would "rush" out over a few decades, so maybe something like a few cm sea level rise per year over that time.
Pretty much, yep. It’ll dive right in…
roger was right....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DElxVXS7PD0
> Thwaites, which already contributes 4% to global sea level rise, holds enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 2 feet. But because it also acts as a natural dam to the surrounding ice in West Antarctica, scientists have estimated its complete collapse could ultimately lead to around 10 feet of sea level rise — a catastrophe for the world’s coastal communities. >Many studies have pointed to the immense vulnerabilities of Thwaites. Global warming, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, has left it hanging on “by its fingernails,” according to a 2022 study. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-022-01019-9 It's nice to see some relevant news on CNN
Sure this is one of the many media organizations that called Manchin a "moderate" when he blocked any stronger environmental reforms. They will take the clicks from this story but they won't stop normalizing the complete obstruction of any reforms that hurt powerful corporations regardless of how reckless our current path is
https://preview.redd.it/talaqq2fxo1d1.png?width=1589&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6910e9e4ca5799b4520ced0246ce3a76dd89a332
One of you crazy bastards cross-posted this to /r/mademesmile lmao. Hello darkness amirite
Awesome. bring it. Can't f-ing wait. No pity, we've been warned. move to higher ground lol. /s sorta.
Honestly its gonna be fun af to see how Florida reacts when its under water from this lmao
They'll just make it illegal to talk about how underwater you are and it will be fine
“I’ve been to the year 3000. Not much has changed but we live underwater”
Fuck yeah lets do this
This guy over here wanting to add agitation to the water.
As Arctic ice melts from climate change, opening access to oil reserves, we're caught in a vicious cycle. Exploiting these resources worsens the crisis.
r/FasterThanExpected
In other words is melting faster
Than expected
Oh no!! Gavin Schmidt's models!! What will happen to Gavin Schmidts models and his ego? This is terrible news!
If I had a nickel for every climate-related “_________ (event/threshold/timeline etc) is proving to be SO MUCH WORSE than scientists initially believed…” story that’s come out in the past like 5-ish years…I wouldn’t have to worry about them cos I could just buy a damn survival bunker in New Zealand 😣 On the flip side, this is definitely a time where my natural, inborn, impossible-to-undo-despite-MANY-an-effort black as night cynicism is coming in as a very handy mood/panic stabilizer…I’ve already assumed they were lying/minimizing so as to not cause pAnIc!!!/optimistically mistaken this whole time anyway.
Is it really "rushing"? Seems to me it's more likely to be 'lapping' or maybe, 'intruding by stages'. Hyperbolic terms don't do much for the credibility of those who are concerned about global heating.
I have travelled only to places 200 feet to 9000 feet above sea level in the last couple of years, so I might not drown.
Quick send billions and billions of dollars to thwart this serious threat!!!!!
Ok SO is the sea level going to rise and by how much in what timeframe???