Melt

 

There have been lots of doom and gloom stories in the media about the melting of the polar ice caps. 

They predict everything from the submersion of Miami to massive fish kills brought about by changes in the ocean’s salinity.  Some of the claims are patently outrageous, but at least some of their predictions are possible- maybe even likely, and the moral is it is all our fault.

Hey! Not so fast there, Buddy! 

Is the ice actually melting?

Yes it is, but the latest scientific evidence proves that it has been in a melting trend since the last ice age. Working in the Antarctic, scientists determined that the shrinkage of the vast ice sheet accelerated during eight distinct episodes over the past 20,000 years, each causing rapid sea level rise.

"Conventional thinking is that the Antarctic ice sheet has been relatively stable since the last ice age, that it began to melt relatively late and that its decline was slow and steady until it reached its present size," said lead author Michael Weber, a scientist from University of Cologne in Germany.
"The sediment record suggests a different pattern - one that is more episodic and suggests that parts of the ice sheet repeatedly became unstable during the last deglaciation,"

These cycles have been going on for at least the last 20,000 years, with a big meltdown about 14,500 years ago.  At that time, the sea level on a global basis rose about 50 feet in just 350 years - or about 20 times faster than sea level rise over the last century," according to Peter Clark, an Oregon State University paleoclimatologist. "We do not yet know what triggered these eight episodes or pulses, but it appears that once the melting of the ice sheet began it was amplified by physical processes."

Hmmmmn….  Wonder what kind of S-U-Vs those evil humans were driving back then.