An entertaining sf novel I read last year was Austral by Paul McAuley, wherein the world has warmed and flooded so much that most of the existing continents lie ruined, but there is a large new state on the warming outside of Antarctica, slowly expanding inward; but it abandoned earlier attempts at stabilization and fell into another rapacious economy dependent on exploitation of humans and of the new mineral resources (before the start of the book). Very depressing in sum.
1: Interesting. How far out is it set? Does go into backstory?
2: I don't know, a few hundred years? Yes, a fair amount of backstory, especially about the previous "ecopoet" movement by independent genetic engineers to introduce new sustainable ecosystems into the new terrain, which the government then suppressed.
By when, even if all the ice melts, there'd be basically just a ring of islands around the submerged mass of E Antarctica?
Popping in on my lunch break to say that the small ray of sunshine (oops) I saw today was that the excellent Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times did a survey to ask his readers what they wanted him to cover about the 2020 election. Climate change was the overwhelming response. His first article is out today.
(This is a good Jay Rosen thread -- haven't read the linked piece yet -- about this model of journalism.)
Another place sent me to an article on the project to build a clock that will still be running 10,000 years from now: http://longnow.org/clock/ When you think of the problem as "What might humans figure out over the next 10,000?" years it definitely changes your perspective. The hopelessness about climate change and humans in general that is such a feature of this decade is somewhat ameliorated. Don't know if that helps. Don't think of your grandkids, think of their grand^^1000 kids.
6 directed toward helpless rage, obv. not ship scheduling and mandatory observers, which seem like a good thing!
6: As a financial journalist, I'm inclined to think that if they really want to succeed, they should have spent as much time thinking about the issues of land ownership over such a scale as the engineering. What
4: Something like that? It doesn't have maps far outside of the Antarctic Peninsula, and places like Australia and Chile are only mentioned in passing.
(For anyone who hypothetically might not have clicked through, the Antarctic tour operators are introducing mandatory collision precautions because the ocean has become so cluttered with goddamn whales.)
11: Less romantic individuals may view this as good news.
By when, even if all the ice melts, there'd be basically just a ring of islands around the submerged mass of E Antarctica?
You don't figure that E Antarctica would rebound above sea-level without the weight of a mile of ice on top of it?
It's geology, bud. It'd take millions of years.
Also, more than two miles in most places.
Nah, there are islands still popping up out of the sea along Sweden's Baltic coast, as the land rises from glaciers that were there less than 20,000 years ago. Maybe they rise a few mm per year, but would I imagine the initial rate of land rebound was much higher once the ice was gone.
Here you can see all the new little islands. So adorable!
17: Tens of milennia or thousands, it still gives you nothing in historical time.
Also, I'm going to go ahead and pull guesses out of my antipode and say the Baltic comparison is extremely weak: the ice sheet was a tiny fraction the mass of that in the Antarctic, it was there for a tiny fraction of the time, it sat on the edge of the continental plate, not the center, and the Baltic is a puddle, average depth less than 60m. ISTR parts of Antarctic bedrock are ~1000m below sea level.
Isostatic rebound is definitely a thing, and it interacts in complicated ways with eustatic sea level rise depending on the details of the local topography/bathymetry. There are numerous examples of this in Southeast Alaska since the Pleistocene, as I'm sure there are in other intermittently glaciated areas. It still definitely happens at a pace too slow to be noticeable on a human time scale, though.
(Because why not use this pseud in this thread?) The first link is about the Arctic, of course, although I'm sure there are "countries eagerly rubbing their hands together, in anticipation of the fish, oil, and gas that will be accessible as the ice disintegrates" in Antarctica too, once they get those pesky treaty obligations scuttled. Which is inevitable, just a matter of details.
5: Can I be an asshole and wonder aloud about WA having lots of hydropower, ethanol and desert solar potential (?) and loggers who maybe want firefighting subsidies to bring down their insurance?
23: I don't think it's inevitable at all. The logistical overheads of Antarctica remain extravagant, and centuries' worth of more accessible reserves of everything remain available. The only possible exception is fish. There the possible politics of the marine convention might get tangled, but AFAICT it actually has a decent chance of survival.
the Baltic comparison is extremely weak: the ice sheet was a tiny fraction the mass of that in the Antarctic, it was there for a tiny fraction of the time, it sat on the edge of the continental plate, not the center, and the Baltic is a puddle, average depth less than 60m. ISTR parts of Antarctic bedrock are ~1000m below sea level.
So many of these elements argue for a far more rapid land rise in Antarctica as compared to the Baltic. If the ice cleared out overnight, you could get half a kilometer of isostatic rebound within a decade, easy. That would get you a solid continent surrounding an East Antarctic lake.
OP.2 is mostly a dry press release trumpeting "effective self-management" which I take as code for "you don't need to actually regulate us!". Any links going into more detail on the underlying issues, like tourism or whales?
In particular: are we sure that increased tourism is related to warming, or could it just be becoming more popular?
The Outer Space Treaty is going to fall before the Antarctic Treaty does.
29: Seconded.
28: Get back to you later.
27: I don't think isostasy works like that. The accumulation of ice pushes the continent down into the mantle, displacing mantle material; the continent stops sinking when equilibrium is reached between the mass of ice and the mass of mantle displaced. Once the ice melts, its mass will be removed but the mass of displaced mantle remain, and cause the continent to rebound. The masses of ice and mantle are vast, but that doesn't mean the rebound will happen quickly. When the continent rebounds it will go from static to moving upwards; that is, accelerate. Acceleration=force/mass; the forces involved are vast, but so too are the masses, and the acceleration correspondingly slow.
(By the same token my own Baltic comparisons are irrelevant.)
STORMCROW, GEOLOGY CLEANUP ON THE FRONT PAGE, PAGING MR. STORMCROW.
That Egyptian courtroom sounds very confusing.
I wonder if Antarctica will get a different name at some point. New Miami? Whales?
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Anyone here have any experience of Stevens Institute of Technology, especially c.1993?
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Although actually the length and scale of Antarctic vs Baltic glaciation does make a difference because of the corresponding difference in changes to the underlying topography. The pre-glacial Antarctic continent hasn't just been depressed isostatically, a lot of it has been ground away and redeposited on the continental shelf, and what remains presumably compressed and deformed downward into basins.
Will piles of penguin shit offset some of the erosion?
As the shit accumulates the beach subsides and erodes into the ocean. Net zero. The pebble-nest thing IDK.
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And/or Senao Networks/EnGenius?
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Small rocks, often worn smooth by rolling in water.
28: General problem overview.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2154896X.2018.1542861#top-content-scroll
According to the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO), 94,186 staff, crew and passengers went to Antarctica in the 2017/18 season.
Internet suggests that the thing which keeps rebound slow isn't so much the large mass of the continent, but instead the viscosity of the mantle.
Belatedly, on heebietake.1, I think the Arctic fisheries agreement is no bad thing in itself, on the face of it it amicably extends to the Arctic the UNCLOS rules prevailing everywhere else (admittedly not having done any diving on that). ISTM the rage should be for the fact of the climate change, not the response to it.
And, wrt fisheries at least, this agreement appears to resolve really long-running disputes on EEZ delimitation, involving at least Russia, the US, and Canada.
||> A compelling but disturbing long read, about a just concluded murder trial in Ireland involving 13 year olds. Reporting was very restricted during the trial, I think rightly so.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/courts/criminal-court/ana-kriegel-murder-trial-the-complete-story-1.3929570?mode=amp
It's not deadly serious as there's nothing confidential in the post but I just don't use my actual name here as it's too distinctive. If a front pager could mop up I'd really appreciate it.
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Some books on nationalist subjects were on sale including "The people who want to eradicate Myanmar", a paperback that includes the chapter "Londonistan: swallowed by Islam".|>
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A decades-long tracking poll by Hong Kong University shows that about 38 percent of Hong Kong citizens feel "proud to be a citizen of China," compared with 47 percent in 1997, when excitement was high over the handover from Britain. Today, 55 percent of young people between 18 and 29 have a negative view of the central Chinese government, compared with 13 percent who see Beijing positively.|>
Arctic paleo-hyenas for those of you who like that sort of thing.
54 Revolting. Show me the Arctic paleo-lions, please.
Sorry for the monstrosity of linking to a tweet linking to a PDF, but here you can find an article on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and outstanding questions about the Southern Ocean. "The Southern Ocean is also arguably the biggest data desert on the planet. . . . The problem is especially severe in winter, when some of the strongest winds on the planet drive massive seas, and when the Antarctic continent effectively doubles in size due to the expansion of sea ice. This makes collecting data from the Southern Ocean using conventional ship-based methods extremely challenging . . . ."
We're all monstrosities around here.