GREENCulture blog We put the “green” in greenyness!

With all the crazy stuff going on in the world today it is easy for people to forget about the least populated place in the world: Antarctica. Antarctica has a huge effect on the world’s ecosystems, although it is desolate and far from most human populations. That’s because Antarctica has about 90% of the world’s ice, and about 70% of the world’s fresh water. Most people are aware that if Greenland’s ice shelf were to fall into the sea, that the global sea level would rise by about twenty feet. However, if the majority of the fresh water on Antarctica were to fall into the sea, the sea level could rise as much as 190 feet, according to some sources like Science Daily. With global temperatures on the rise, it is in everyone’s interest to watch the Antarctic ice sheets closely.

Composite satellite image of Antarctica.

Obviously the chances of all this ice falling into the sea at once are very low. However, even a small rise in sea level by a few feet could trigger a massive chain reaction of melting in the low-lying Antarctic regions as the sea water comes into contact with the freshwater ice. This is where the danger lies. Since the ice is very cold and dry in Antarctica and other polar regions, it remains in place by sticking to the rocks. Rising sea levels can cause water to come between the ice and the Antarctic rocks, causing the ice to become un-stuck and very slippery against the rocks. The ice eventually cracks and large chunks slide into the ocean due to gravity, where they eventually melt and raise the sea level little by little. Bit by bit, the sea keeps coming into contact with more and more ice, which gets unstuck, and the process perpetuates itself indefinitely.

Once of the reasons why this is so alarming is that Antarctic ice is not just ordinary ice. Antarctic ice is extremely dense because it has been packed down for thousands of years by metric tons of other ice. Antarctica’s ice sheet is about a mile thick on average, so the ice really gets packed down. This makes Antarctic ice much denser than normal ice due to gravity. When ice has been frozen for many thousands of years and put under a lot of pressure, gravity squeezes all of the air molecules out, causing the ice to crystallize. This makes the ice blue and transparent like water, and in this state the ice is known as ‘blue ice,’ which is also the form of ice that exists in glaciers. This ice is so dense that it is the form of ice responsible for puncturing the steel hull of the Titanic.

When this ice becomes unstuck and falls into the sea, it is practically irreplaceable because it has been formed over thousands of years and is much denser than normal ice. This issue is compounded by the fact that it is so cold in Antarctica that little to no precipitation usually falls. Technically Antarctica is considered a desert! It is literally too cold and dry to snow in most places in Antarctica. Therefore the replacement rate of this ice is nowhere near the rate that it is being destroyed. What this means is that once we start this process of the destruction of Antarctica’s ice sheet, it cannot be stopped. We all need to pay attention to Antarctica’s sensitive ecosystem and take every opportunity to protect it, or the global environment that we know now may change forever.