40 min listen
35 Richard Alley - West Antarctica Is Melting and We Can't Stop It
FromInquiring Minds
ratings:
Length:
55 minutes
Released:
May 22, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
If you want to truly grasp the scale of the Earth's polar ice sheets, you need some help from Isaac Newton. Newton taught us the universal law of gravitation, which states that all objects are attracted to one another in proportion to their masses (and the distance between them). The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland are incredibly massive—Antarctica's ice is more than two miles thick in places and 5.4 million square miles in extent. These ice sheets are so large, in fact, that gravitational attraction pulls the surrounding ocean towards them. The sea level therefore rises upward at an angle as you approach an ice sheet, and slopes downward and away as you leave its presence.
This is not good news for humanity. As the ice sheets melt due to global warming, not only do they raise the sea level directly; they also exert a smaller gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean. So water sloshes back towards the continents, where we all live. "If Antarctica shrinks and puts that water in the ocean, the ocean raises around the world, but then Antarctica is pulling the ocean towards it less strongly," explained the celebrated Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley on this week’s episode. "And as that extra water around Antarctica spreads around the world, we will get a little more sea level rise in the US than the global average."
Alley, a self-described “registered Republican” and host of the PBS program Earth: The Operators’ Manual, spoke on the occasion of truly dire news, of the sort that ice sheet experts like him have been dreading for some time. Last week, we learned from two separate research teams that the ice sheet of West Antarctica, which comprises just one relatively small part of Antarctic ice overall but contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 10 or 11 feet, has been irrevocably destabilized. Scientists have long feared that of all the planet's great ice sheets, West Antarctica would be the first to go, because much of it is marine-based—the front edge of the ice sheet is bathing in increasingly warm water, which is melting it from beneath. On the show this week we talked to Alley about the science of ice sheets and what this most recent news means for our future.
This episode also features a discussion of a controversial project to replicate some of the most famous studies in social science, and of new research on whether firstborn children are more politically conservative than their later-born siblings.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943
RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-minds
Stitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds
This is not good news for humanity. As the ice sheets melt due to global warming, not only do they raise the sea level directly; they also exert a smaller gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean. So water sloshes back towards the continents, where we all live. "If Antarctica shrinks and puts that water in the ocean, the ocean raises around the world, but then Antarctica is pulling the ocean towards it less strongly," explained the celebrated Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley on this week’s episode. "And as that extra water around Antarctica spreads around the world, we will get a little more sea level rise in the US than the global average."
Alley, a self-described “registered Republican” and host of the PBS program Earth: The Operators’ Manual, spoke on the occasion of truly dire news, of the sort that ice sheet experts like him have been dreading for some time. Last week, we learned from two separate research teams that the ice sheet of West Antarctica, which comprises just one relatively small part of Antarctic ice overall but contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 10 or 11 feet, has been irrevocably destabilized. Scientists have long feared that of all the planet's great ice sheets, West Antarctica would be the first to go, because much of it is marine-based—the front edge of the ice sheet is bathing in increasingly warm water, which is melting it from beneath. On the show this week we talked to Alley about the science of ice sheets and what this most recent news means for our future.
This episode also features a discussion of a controversial project to replicate some of the most famous studies in social science, and of new research on whether firstborn children are more politically conservative than their later-born siblings.
iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943
RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-minds
Stitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds
Released:
May 22, 2014
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
8 Alison Gopnik - We All Start Out as Scientists, But Some of Us Forget: This week we feature a conversation with psychologist Alison Gopnik, recorded live at the 2013 Bay Area Science Festival. Gopnik talks about her latest book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Inquiring Minds