17 December

Enormous icebergs keep breaking free from the huge Antarctic ice sheet. There are 30 million cubic KILOMETRES of ice in Antarctica. That’s 90% of the world’s surface fresh water. If it all melted, the oceans would rise by 70 METRES. Let that sink in, it’s a staggering amount of water frozen down there. It’s melting. The icebergs are floating into the oceans and acting literally as giant ice cubes. To get a sense of the scale here, one iceberg alone is over 3000 square kilometres, and has the potential to cool the entire Southern Ocean by 1 degree. About 70,000 gigatonnes of ice is breaking free, 50 enormous icebergs. This could trigger a new Ice Age, previous Ice Ages often followed the breaking free of lots of large icebergs from Antarctica. Cooling the oceans can stop major currents from flowing around the globe. And those currents carry heat. The melting water also dilutes seawater, making it less salty, and this also dramatically changes how currents behave. It could also trigger more and more La Ninas, because those are dependent on ocean temperature. We’ve had 3 in a row here in Oz. An ice age was always one possible outcome of global warming, which perplexes people who don’t think very much. Hollywood even made a movie about it. And this is all happening very fast. These massive icebergs will enter the oceans within the next 2 years. I’ll post separately how you can even watch them with satellites.