Polar Collapse

Global Warming Accelerates

Enormous Ice Sheets Disintegrating

Collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf (above)

Arctic Ice In Serious Decline, April 2008

Alarming new data showing the extent of Arctic comes from the Canadian coast guard.

The long 4,400 mile coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Arctic, which in 1900 was completely ringed with ice, now claims merely five remaining shelves. Among these the largest, the Ward Ice Shelf shows signs of immanent break-up as deep fissures many miles in length grow at an alarming rate. These notable Arctic changes are of course augmented by the better known Antarctic shifts which were fully covered by Historacle in 2002.

Larsen B Ice Shelf Collapses, February 2002 (reprinted).
Is global catastrophy just around the corner? Alarming, recent satellite imagery shows the collapse of a gigantiic Antarctic ice shelf, the largest such event of last 30 years. The shattered ice has formed a plume of thousands of icebergs adrift in the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula. Nearly 1,250 square miles, of shelf area has collapsed during February of this year. Over the last five years, the four hundred year old Larsen B shelf has lost a total of 2,200 square miles; but 40% of its traditional area remains.
Scientists are now forced to reasses the stablity of Antarctic ice. Supported by glaciologists, climatologists confirm that we are closer to the limit than we thought" Experts attribute the retreats to strong regional climate warming. Antarctic temperatures have increased about 2.5 degrees Celsius since the late 1940s. Since 1974 ice shelf extent in the Antarctic Peninsula has declined by 5,200 square miles.
Once melt water appears on the surface of ice shelves, the rate of ice disintegration increases. Regions of the giant "Ross Ice Shelf are just a few degrees celsius away
from being overtaken by the same processes that have destroyed the Larsen." Like ice cubes in a glass, once the first signs of visible melting appears, melting then cascades at an ever accelerating pace. The loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet alone would yield an immediate 20 foot rise in sea level.
While the breakup of peninsular ice shelves has limited, direct consequence for sea-level rise; it is a harbinger of a broader meltdown of worldwide alpine and continental glaciers as well as Antarctica continent itself. The melting of polar ice caps would account for an over 200 foot rise in sea levels submerging most of the world's largest cities. The attendant global warming and climatic changes will see the spread of deserts take over the temperate zones, eliminating most agricultural regions of the world.
The scenario is now commonplace. Fresh water will fall into critical short supply. Competition for habitable land will become intense. While their citzens within them compete for depleted resources, nations will increasingly resort to warfare to secure their survival. Civilization as we know it will be ground to its knees. The very existence of the human race, as well as the ecosystem itself, will be in jeaporady.
Lest we be complacent, prehistory confronts us with many mass extinctions in the past. The collapse of the Larsen ice shelf suggests a broad catastrophy is imminent. It is not too late to avoid demise. Our formal understanding and technology are capable. As we have seen consumptive lifestyle, comfortable old habits and myths about necessity of sustaining high economic growth rates all die hard. Will society accept the challenge before it is too late or will we, by default, choose to join the dinosaur and the mastadon.
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Last Global Warming Created Our World Will This One Destroy It?
Those who discount the significance of global warming tend to be bound to corporate interest. They lag the public in support of action. U.S. government resistance to the Kyoto Accords for example is a case in point. The last great global warming occurred during the Late Pleistocene between about 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Then as now, the climate and biosystem were changing rapidly. Temperatures were rising; seasonal differences, increasing; rain- fall patterns, shifting and glaciers, melting. Climate changes caused fundamental changes in the Earth's ecosystems. Plants and animals were moved out of areas they had lived in and into new areas. Across the world the same pattern of species shifting northward forcing many species to extirpation is fully evident today. The World Wildlife Federation confirms animal and plant extinctions are occurring at alarming rates. The transformation in the Late Pleistocene was immeasurable. Like the obvious signs represented by the collapse of Antarctic Ice Shelves; glaciers retreated and many species like the Mammoth, Mastadon, Sabre- Tooth Tiger slid into oblivion. The more temperate climates which emerged set the stage for agriculture across Asia, Europe, and North America. With a burgeoning pop- ulation, Civilization and the world as we have come to know it, blossom- ed from about 3,000 B.C. onward. Will the global warming we face today be so kind to mankind? Not likely, for it stands upon the previous warmings making the inhabited areas of the world just too hot and dry to sustain the enormous human population of the earth today.
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EXTINCTION And The Laws of Nature

Simonodon
SabreToothed Tiger
While we are prone to think of the extinction of the mighty dinosaurs caused by the accidental impact of a collosal asteroid as an exceptionalevent history shows that it was not. Ninety-seven percent of all species which have ever lived are extinct today. Fossil Mammoth As powerful and well adapted as they were neither the sabre tooth tiger nor the mastodon could avoid extinction during the last global warming in the


Late Pleistocene, between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago when faced with drastic environmental change. As the fossil record and the ruins of ancient civilizations attest, "Extinction", far from being an exception in history is the rule in history and the law of science.

. Athabaska Glacier