Archive for Poles
The European Space Agency (ESA) reported a few days ago that new rifts have developed on the Wilkins Ice Shelf. This could lead to the melting of a lot of ice in Antarctica
Since it would take a melting of only five percent of the sixth continent for sea levels to rise by three meters, each sign of decreasing ice amounts there from has to be reported.
Even if these rifts won’t lead directly to such a phenomenon, they show a direct sign that something is wrong with our climate. Continue reading »
Arctic ice keeps on melting more and more…
Posted by: on September 24, 2008 in Tags: Climate change, Poles
You perhaps read it before somewhere else as I am pretty late on this, but Arctic sea ice melt to a worrying extent this summer and almost beat last year’s record.
But according to the people from the WWF, the extent may not be as small as last year, but in terms of thickness - and thus of amount - this summer broke all records.
it is normal for temperatures to keep on rising as our greenhouse gases emissions keep on doing so. It seems this phenomenon won’t end anytime soon. Continue reading »
What if Antarctica’s ice melt ?
Posted by: on September 15, 2008 in Tags: Climate change, Poles, Sciences
As we saw three weeks ago in my article on the scientific data on level sea rise, the melting of both Arctic and Antarctica are one of the main components of the phenomenon.
Even if the Arctic is quite well documented, Antarctica is not that well known. 25 times bigger than France and weighting billions of tons of ice, the sixth continent is a huge unknown.
If a single percent of all this ice melt, it would represent a sea level rise by a staggering 60 centimeters (two feet)… A serious danger I will study today. Continue reading »
According to a study released today by the United States Geological Survey, a fifth of world oil and natural gas reserves may be located under the Arctic.
This would represent 90 billion barrels of oil and a lot of natural gas. As you can imagine, countries of this region - The United States, Canada and Russia - are willing to tap this real treasury.
But, wouldn’t burning all this oil spells disaster and certain doom to all of us ? This is a question I have been meaning to ask today. Continue reading »
Highest concentration of CO2 over 800,000 years
Posted by: on May 15, 2008 in Tags: Climate change, Poles, SciencesAccording to a study released in the US magazine Nature, the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations are currently at their highest in the last 800,000 years.
This is the conclusion drawn by European scientists after drilling the ice of Antarctica over 3 kilometers. According to Le Figaro it is the result of more than 20 years of work.
This is another sign reinforcing even more the urgency of acting fast and big toward climate change mitigation. Continue reading »
