It's Melting! It's Melting!

Photo from coolantarctica.com

I've been an Antarctica fan from way back. I spent the late 90's reading everything I could get my hands on about Scott's ill-fated South Pole expedition, and about the amazing survival, some years later, of Sir Earnest Shackleton and his men, whose ship was actually trapped and crushed by pack ice as winter closed in. The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is one of my desert-island books. It never occurred to me, while reading the explorers' tales of pressure ice, sea ice, and sastrugi ice that someday there might be NO ice.

Then in 2002, part of the Larsen B Ice Shelf —a piece as big as Rhode Island—fell into the sea. Nobody marched in the streets.

I heard on NPR yesterday that the Antarctic ice is melting much faster than scientists thought it was. People in Seattle seemed to continue their daily rounds without alarm.

Scientists have been trying to get our attention about the Antarctic ice for years. During a quick venture out onto the Internet today, I found variations on the same headline over and over, dating back to the early 2000's: "Ice melting faster than scientists had predicted." or "Ice melting faster than previously thought." The BBC mentioned it in 2005. The Washington Post told us in 2006 that the ice is losing 36 cubic miles of ice a year. The Australian said today that "...West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula lost nearly 200 billion tonnes of ice in 2006 alone."

I remember being chilled to the marrow as I read and re-read a brilliantly written three-part article by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker back in April 2005. In the article she explains that the surface of the ice is reflective and keeps the ocean from heating up. When there's less ice, the ocean becomes warmer. The warmer the ocean, the faster the ice melts. You see where I'm going with this? (She does a better job of explaining it there than I can here, so I encourage you to read the article.)

A melting Antarctica terrifies me.

Not because sea level is rising (and it is, inexorably, as the ice at both poles continues to melt), but because, once the ice-melt reaches a certain point, we will never get it back.

This is what I think of, every time I put the key in the ignition of my car. And on my less selfish, more organized days, it is what gets me onto the bus.