top | item 14828980

(no title)

kenfox | 8 years ago

The language that scientists have used is significantly less confident than yours (from http://www.projectmidas.org/blog/calving/):

> Dr Martin O’Leary: “Although this is a natural event, and we’re not aware of any link to human-induced climate change, this puts the ice shelf in a very vulnerable position. This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history."

I interpret those comments as saying it's currently an open research question. Lots of popular press I've read though does leap to there being some link. I think it pays to be open minded here and consider that ocean and polar warming could have an impact on ice shelf stability.

discuss

order

_puk|8 years ago

"This is the furthest back that the ice front has been in recorded history."

I'm curious; in the context of the ice front, when does recorded history begin?

Are we talking, 10s, 100s, or 1000s of years?

strainer|8 years ago

An obvious minimum link is that the area which has melted and broke off, also coincidently happens to have elevated temps recorded and indicated by modelling.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/warming_antarctic...

There is still the whole "correlation isnt causation / aint necessarily so" caveat, but the correlation with AWG is obvious.