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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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Ordinarily, the bright, white surface of glacial ice found in ice sheets such as the ones that cover Greenland and Antarctica serve to function as reflectors that bounce a certain amount of solar radiation back into space — this effect also helps prevent the ice from being directly warmed too much by the sun. The effect of the ice’s reflectiveness, or albedo, can be compromised by changes in its color, for instance by soot being deposited on the surface from large wildfires ravaging a different part of the globe. The darkening of the ice causes it to absorb more sunlight, and in turn this increases the temperature of the ice, hastening its rate of melt. Now, a new factor has been identified that can darken the albedo of Greenland’s ice: the spread of simple algae.
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A Delaware-sized portion of Antarctica’s forth-largest ice shelf calved off, sometime between July 10th and 12th, following the rapid propagation of a 127 kilometer (79 mile) long crack running through the sheet. The resulting iceberg is over 200 meters (656 feet) thick, and covers roughly 6,000 square kilometers (Delaware itself is only 5,130 square kilometers (1,982 square miles). This will likely place it as the third-largest known iceberg in modern history.
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A new study published in the journal Nature has illustrated that the global rise in sea levels is worse than originally anticipated, and the rate of increase is accelerating. Between 1993 and 2014, the rate of increase jumped by 50 percent, with the average rise in 1993 being 2.2 millimeters (0.87 inches), and 2014 showing a rise of 3.3 millimeters (0.13 inches). This study follows an earlier paper that found that sea level increases are now nearly triple that of their pre-1990 levels.
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