Cover of Time: The Great Crack-Up

The Great Crack-Up

Jeffrey Kluger, January 19, 2018 (Time Magazine)

“…Human beings typically do our worst environmental damage in the places we live and work—clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains. Antarctica, however, was more or less out of reach. No more…Climate change has become our species’ great destructive equalizer, leaving no part of the planet safe from the harm we do. In March 2017, the sea ice around both poles reached a record low for that time of year. In July, a 1 trillion–ton iceberg, roughly the size of Delaware, calved off of the Larsen C ice shelf in western Antarctica. The damage to the ice is being done not just from above, as the planet’s air warms, but from below, as its oceans do too…While the disappearance of Arctic sea ice is enough of an environmental calamity, it’s the ice that covers Antarctica that is a bigger real menace.

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...[A Time Magazine photo-journalist recently documented its melting. As it] sloughs off the land, it raises sea levels worldwide…[I]f greenhouse-gas emissions continue at their current rate, low-lying areas around the world could by deluged by up to 4 ft. of sea-level increase before the end of the century… A more-recent study suggests that increased snowfall on the eastern end of Antarctica—another result of climate change—may offset that a bit, restoring some of what’s lost, but the snow is likely only to slow sea-level rise, not stop it…” click here for more

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