World’s biggest iceberg heads for disaster
graphics.reuters.com
graphics.reuters.com
You can keep updated on the progress yourself at the link below. You can also incrementally scroll through he dates using the hour and days.
https://zoom.earth/#view=-55.22,-33.635,7z/date=2020-12-20,1...
"As of 17 December 2020, a part of the iceberg was just 50 km (31 mi) from South Georgia, but the concern seemed to have lessened. National Geographic reported that "[s]cientists expect the iceberg ... to either anchor in the shallow waters around the island or move past it in the coming days." On this date it was also reported that a corner had been knocked off A-68A, most likely due to impact with the seabed. The new free floating iceberg has been designated A-68D."
>In an earlier version of this article, the story incorrectly stated the iceberg was a similar size to Jamaica. This has been changed to say a similar shape to Jamaica.
Still, at 2/5 the size of Jamaica, this freely moving ice mass is enormous.
But an iceberg has a profound impact on the ocean ecosystem its melting into. This enormous iceberg is having a continuous impact, for better or for worse, just by existing.
I bet most people have never conceived of a mass of ice this size colliding with anything. Watching it unfold should be captivating and unsettling.
As bad as this is, there's probably more to come.
Multiple mechanisms.
More like a really slow, flat comet!
It's also a bit late at this point. The time to get things done was years ago.
(and no, an iceberg is NOT anything like a hurricane, which is a heat engine phenomena -- you can definitely shatter an iceberg)
Trump recently asked if nukes could be used for disrupting hurricanes, and the answer was resoundingly no.
(Perhaps space-beamed microwaves, but there's an issue of scale and interaction with the ozone.)
Perhaps check out 'Seveneves' by Neal Stephenson for a (fictional) look at why shattering large things isn't always a good idea.
So basically instead of letting an ice sheet disrupt the ecosystem across many thousands of square km, you think it would be better to nuke many thousands of square km of ecosystem. Huh.
The actual disaster here is the possibility of global warming causing the ice caps to melt en masse, but that's a different problem.
Melting away isn't what is expected, is what turns this into a localised disaster.
How much damage has to happen before the global environment becomes unrecoverable?
The fact is the majority of penguin species today have declining populations. Those are not recovering. A couple of million of them getting wiped out is unlikely to help reverse that downward trend.
Where the damage in question consists of dumping freshwater into the sea? It would take more water than exists in the world to do irrecoverable damage that way. Try to avoid learning about rivers.
Fresh water has a different density than salt water, and ice melting in the artic and antarctica is resulting in a huge influx of fresh water that can disrupt ocean currents [2]. These currents currently distribute a lot of heat around the world, and them stopping would result in places like europe getting much colder, while other regions would become much hotter (and with the warmer oceans, probably also have extremer hurricanes).
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/earths-fresh-water/
[2] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_thermohaline_circulat...
That is a _very_ odd definition of a disaster. The Earth recovered from several mass extinction events. Does that mean that they were not in point of fact, disasters? That nothing is a disaster?
It is a localised disaster. Not all disasters have to be on the global scale to have relevance.
And Antarctic waters are biologically rich: https://discoveringantarctica.org.uk/ecosystems-and-foodwebs...
A few hundred years ago it wouldn't be a disaster because you'd have millions of seals and penguins everywhere. And such an impact would affect a minor fraction of a percent of a population.
These days, however, even the most populous species are constantly on the brink of extinction.
In case of most animal and bird species, however, they are a metaphorical iceberg away from serious existential threat.
I see this as nature in action. Our environment is constantly in flux. Yes, this was indirectly caused by human activities, but we would get to witness first hand how this changes the environment. And maybe some good would come of it.