Global destruction if East Antarctic ice melts

Parts of the enormous ice sheets of East Antarctica have begun to slowly melt away – if this happens, they could collectively raise the water level of the global sea by 53 metres, which is a promise of an irreversible global disaster. It will begin an unstoppable process of global coastal disaster, scientists have warned.

Widely considered to be more stable than the West Antarctic ice sheet, a studies now suggest that the East Antarctic ice sheet will become widely instable after the thin section of ice holding the coast is lost.

This slab of coastal ice is all that it holding the Wilkes Basin ice sheet from slipping over into the sea. After this, it will continue to pour vast amounts of water into the ocean, consequently affecting global water levels, raising it by an estimate of three or four meters, the researchers said.

Matthais Mengel of the of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany, and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change said that East Antarctica’s Wilkes Basin is like a slanted bottle, which will continuously pour out until it empties, if it is uncorked.

Mengel added that the sea-level contribution of the East Antarctic ice sheet may be greater than that of West Antarctic in the long run because it holds ten times the volume of ice than the latter, which is “important for the millions of people who live on the coasts” because “every centimeter of sea level rise on top of what is already expected is going to be even more difficult to adapt to.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that estimating the future rises in the global sea-level in the future is difficult because of the unknown affects of the Antarctic among other reasons. Their latest report, published in March, 2014, said that the ice continent’s total sea level contribution could be up to 16cm this century.

Professor Levermann said that they do not know yet if they’ve initiated the process which will eventually uncork the Wilkes Basin, but it is “fair to say that if we continue unmitigated climate change and global warming then we'll destabilise parts of Antarctica and trigger a discharge of ice that will not stop for centuries”.