Antarctica discovered contributing to sea-level rise—still!

Dinner in snow kitchen. McMurdo Station, 2010

Sea-level rise (SLR) is a stealthy impact of global warming, showing up unwelcome as storms have hit the coastlines of the globe. There's more to come. 

I’ve often blogged on how Antarctica influences sea level rise and the uncertainties about how much (11/5/2017; 1/8/2017).

In a recent letter to the international journal Nature, Slater and Shepherd (1) have drawn attention to new data on ice mass loss from Antarctica detected by satellite measurements over the ten-year period 2007-2017. Converting ice mass to SLR they observed that the rate of Antarctica’s contribution to SLR has increased 40% in the past few years—it’s accelerating. 

They compared the SLR contribution for Antarctica they computed against the projected SLR that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued in its last report in 2013 (AR5; 2). What they note is that the SLR they measured follows the AR5 predicted curve for the business-as-usual, worst-case circumstance. This is when no real effort is made by nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The unsettling conclusion is that the worst-case predicted curve computed five years ago is now matched by observations. The AR5 report projects a worst-case 980 millimeters (38 inches) of SLR by the year 2100. Of this Antarctica is on track to contribute 151 millimeters (6 inches). 

Slater and Shepherd note that as little as 10 centimeters (100 millimeters; 4 inches) of storm surge results in floods in many coastal locations. We’ve all seen this on the news. 

Taken in total, over 3 feet of SLR predicted for the world will result in coastal retreat of beaches, cliffs, buildings, towns, and infrastructure. It could be even worse. The prediction curves do not account for catastrophic events like Antarctic ice cliff collapse that I’ve covered in previous blog entries listed above. That could result in doubling SLR to 6 feet by 2100. 

Santa Barbara, my city, is preparing for a century of SLR with the adaptation and mitigation that this will require (When-will-sea-level-rise-swallow-Santa-Barbara?).

1. Antarctic ice losses tracking high; Nature Climate Change, | VOL 8 | DECEMBER 2018 | 1024–1026.

2. Church, J. A. et al. in Climate Change 2013: e Physical Science Basis (eds Stocker, T. F. et al.) Ch. 13 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013). 

Penguins everywhere! Antarctic populations increasing

Adelie penguins crossing in front of the research icebreaker N.B. Palmer.
  Photo © John Diebold.

To prove that Antarctica still keeps many secrets and is full of surprises, an enormous penguin colony has been discovered by satellite imagery combined with ground and aerial drone surveys. 

Writing in Scientific Reports,¹ Borowicz et al. detected a previously unknown colony of more than 750,000 Adélie penguin-mating pairs on the Danger Islands. That island group is located in a rarely visited area near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula across from South America. The Danger Islands are on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Colonies on the western side have suffered a decrease in population over the past few decades. These decreases have been attributed to climate change. Historical aerial photos of the Danger Islands show that the population there has been stable over the years. The discovery of a robust population on the eastern side of the peninsula minimizes the overall impact of global warming on the population in the peninsula region.

Asking the larger question, how have the numbers of Adélie penguins fared over recent decades, Lynch and LaRue² reported another surprising result in 2014. They conducted a census of Adélie populations across all of Antarctica and found a greater than 50% increase in the population of mating pairs since the last estimates in 1993. Part of the increase was due to using improved satellite imagery and other survey methods. They found a total population of almost 3.8 million mating pairs. Borowicz et al. note that the Lynch and LaRue census missed much of the giant colony they found on the Danger Islands, so the number of mating pairs is likely even larger. Looking closer, Lynch and LaRue also found that populations decreased on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula but that decrease was offset by a substantial increase in mating pairs on East Antarctica. They attribute these patterns to climate change. For one, Adélies depend on krill associated with sea ice. Sea ice has decreased off western Antarctic Peninsula due to warming temperature there but has increased in the Ross Sea and in East Antarctica, thus supporting population growth. I discussed the connections between sea ice and climate change in a blog in 2014. For another reason, climate change has caused coastal ice retreat in many regions around the continent. In East Antarctica, this has created ice-free ground for new colonies to be established and for existing colonies to expand. They propose eleven new colonies in their census. 

Penguins inspecting human, Sulzberger Bay, Marie Byrd Land.
Photo © B. Luyendyk

These studies are good news. Who doesn’t love penguins? I’ve encountered a few, from a legal distance, in my Antarctic visits. One memorable encounter occurred from an icebreaker off Cape Adare where a very large colony was established on a cliff face hundreds of feet tall. The black basalt rock was stained pink – penguin guano, pink from digesting krill, their main food. Even from a mile or so offshore, the stench was overwhelming!

1 Borowicz, A., McDowall, P., Youngflesh, C., Sayre-McCord, T., Clucas, G., Herman, R., Forrest, S., Rider, M., Schwaller, M., Hart, T. and Jenouvrier, S., 2018. Multi-modal survey of Adélie penguin mega-colonies reveals the Danger Islands as a seabird hotspot. Scientific reports, 8(1), p.3926.

2 Lynch, H.J. and LaRue, M.A., 2014. First global census of the Adélie Penguin. The Auk, 131(4), pp.457-466.

On the Billboard, MBL, West Antarctica

The Billboard, Sarnoff Mts., Marie Byrd Land.
Photo B. Luyendyk, © Amer. Geophys. Union. 

From a distance, we saw the tall face of the buff-colored granite tower known as The Billboard illuminated by a low Antarctic sun. 

It cast a deep blue shadow on the ice surface behind it and stood out abruptly from the ice plain along with its brother peaks. They marked the last visual evidence of solid ground at the edge of the vast West Antarctic Ice sheet that continued to infinity beyond them to the east. Our helicopter slowly circled the plateau that marked the top of this monolith; we approached for a landing and the helo gently shuddered and sounded its loud clop-clop-clop as the pilot slowed the craft and prepared to land. The plateau was bare of snow except for a small patch he selected to rest on. We settled down with a rocking motion. The jet engine whined as it came to a stop. Suddenly it was silent, as we were. Before us lay a panorama not seen but by only a handful of humans. Certainly, no one had been to the top of this rock before.
         I stepped out and my boots squeaked in the snow. There was no other sound and no wind. The air was clean and sharp in my nostrils. Above us was the sky without a cloud. I left K.L. and Colin behind and cautiously made my way to the cliff at the plateau edge 100 yards distant. Here I saw the drop was vertical and froze; my altimeter showed the plateau was 2300 feet above the ice plain directly below. I stepped back.

         Behind me K.L. was setting up his camera; still, no one had spoken. I could hear my breathing as I took account of the remarkable place where I found myself. I surveyed 360 degrees of the horizon and I found my thoughts blocked and my head swelling with fullness. Nowhere else on Earth can a human experience such isolation and pure beauty. I didn't know what protocol to follow to demonstrate the effect this event was having on me. Far to the north another range appeared, jet black and confusing my eyes against the white snow and ice.

         

Luyendyk on Billboard, January 8, 1993. Photo © Kuno Lecha

The sun's disk was low over the horizon because it was near midnight. Beneath it, the blue-white ice changed to a gold and silver path leading towards me. The sky glowed orange and pink around the sun as I faced it while behind me was a deep indigo. Between me and the horizon, tens of miles away lay an undulating expanse of white and blue. A few scattered hills and peaks interrupted the enormity of the snow surface. I gazed for a few minutes and imagined that the undulations were moving, that the peaks were islands, and that we had found ourselves inside a white ocean.

Melting Antarctic Ice Targets California

Mount Minot, Northern Victoria Land. Photo ©  B. Luyendyk

Global sea-level has been creeping upward over the past decades, now at a rate of about 3 mm/ year (1). This is largely due to warming of the world ocean (thermal expansion) and melting of ice now sitting on land. What about the future and what about California and sea-level rise?

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine you filled your bathtub at home with a generous amount of water, and you slide a block of ice into it. The water level goes up of course, and to the same level all around the tub. 

Now take that thought experiment to the globe; add ice from West Antarctica, say 2 million gigatons to the world ocean (see West Antarctic Ice Sheet; WAIS; assuming 917 kilograms per cubic meter of ice). 


The average rise in sea level would be around 14 feet (4.3 meters ref. 2).

The concern now is not the entire WAIS suddenly melting away but ice in the Amundsen Sea Embayment rapidly discharging into the sea in this century. This drainage, which includes the Pine Island Glacier (blog 10/6/17) and massive Thwaites Glacier, can contribute 4 feet of sea-level rise in a matter of decades (3). This is worrying.

But surprise! Sea-level won’t go up 4 feet everywhere. Sea-level isn’t level, it’s lumpy. Some places around the world it will rise more and some less. California is one of the places it will rise more. Why is this so?

The lumps and bumps in sea-level are affected by Earth’s rotation, ocean currents, and the distribution of mass on Earth’s surface and in its mantle. The massive amount of ice sitting atop Greenland and Antarctica draw sea-level upward due to gravitational attraction. Decrease that mass by melting and there is a counter-intuitive result; sea-level drops around Greenland and Antarctica. Where does that water go? It moves to lower latitudes. In fact, sea-level along the coast of California will rise 125% of the global average from melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (4).

Of course, there’s another “but”. The paragraphs above talk about how global sea-level rise will vary from place to place, but we want to know how much it will rise where we live. Still more factors come into play to figure out changes in local sea level. This is the quest of the California Ocean Protection Council (COPC), who issued a report (5) this year seeking to answer that question. An obvious concern is whether a coastal location where you live is moving up or down on its own, regardless of sea-level rise. Effects that cause this vertical motion are tectonic uplift, particularly in northern California, sediment compaction along the coasts (sinking), and withdrawal of groundwater and/or hydrocarbons (also sinking). It’s the net effect of sea-level rise due to global scale effects and local effects just mentioned that determine the rate and amount of sea-level rise and its impact at any location.

The Council’s report considered historical records at three tide gauges along the California coast. At Crescent City, local sea-level has been dropping at around 0.8 mm/yr over 84 years, while global sea-level has been rising. Tectonic uplift predominates in northern California and is currently faster than sea-level rise. At San Francisco local sea-level has been rising at 1.84 mm/yr since 1855, and at San Diego, the average rate of rise is 2.13 mm/yr since 1906.

These rates in California over the past decades are linear on average—a straight line. There’s another “but”; projecting sea level rise in the global warming world reveals rise rates that accelerate. In fact, that is seen in data for the last few decades (6). The job of the COPC is to predict amounts of rise for the California coast under several different global warming scenarios.

They chose three different warming scenarios (greenhouse gas increases) as defined by the last IPCC  report (ref. 7; AR5).  Next, they used probability methods (8) to predict the chances of sea-level rise of a certain amount at these three places along the California coast. What did they find? The report gives the predictions at several levels of chance but I’ll present those for a 2-in-3 chance of a range of sea-level rise (ref 5; Table 1).

For starters, the COPC report states that the effects of climate change on sea-level start appearing in a dramatic way in mid-century. This is because the main effect of climate change on Antarctic ice melt now is a warming ocean but by mid-century, the main effect will be a warming atmosphere. That will drive faster melting. Here’s my distillation of Table 1 for the 2-in-3 chances (67%) and the IPCC mid-way warming estimate for the year 2100 (RCP 4.3).

Crescent City

Year 2030	0.0 – 0.3 ft
Year 2050	0.2 – 0.7 ft
Year 2100	0.3 – 2.7 ft

San Francisco

Year 2030	0.3 – 0.5 ft
Year 2050	0.6 – 1.1 ft
Year 2100	1.3 – 2.8 ft

La Jolla

Year 2030	0.4 – 0.6 ft
Year 2050	0.7 – 1.2 ft
Year 2100	1.3 – 2.8 ft

Added to these estimates of sea-level rise are the inevitable shorter-term events such as El Nino, storm surges, and King Tides.

Clearly, we need to pay attention and prepare.

The last “but” I want to introduce is the newly understood process of ice cliff collapse for Antarctic ice sheet retreat that I presented in my 1/8/17 blog. The COPC report also considers this as a possible sea-level rise impact on California. Not having enough data on this process to come up with a probability approach, the authors compute a model for sea level rise due to Antarctic ice sheet collapse without error limits. They call it the H++  model (9) based on research by DeConto and Pollard (10) and is considered a mean estimate for the consequence of the collapse of parts of the WAIS in the near future.

H++ scenario

Crescent City

Year 2100 = 9.3 ft

Year 2150 = 21 ft.

San Francisco

Year 2100 = 10 ft

Year 2150 = 22 ft

La Jolla

Year 2100 = 10 ft

Year 2150 = 22 ft

Where are we with this? For certain, it’s West Antarctica’s future that is the most serious challenge for California. The sea-level rise projections from Table 1 are limited to several feet this century. We can engineer for this – at considerable effort and expense, but it can be done. Once again, I conclude that West Antarctic ice stability is the wild card (blog 5/20/14). If it comes to pass that the WAIS begins collapsing by midcentury, we will see it. Then our response will be migration, not engineering. I won’t be migrating; my grandchildren will.

These projections are not based on fantasy and fake models. The geologic record not so long ago shows an analog for what we face. Geologic evidence from the Last Interglacial 125 thousand years ago, shows that with global temperatures similar to today sea-level was 20 to 30 feet higher (6 to 9 meters; ref. 11).

We cannot wait for the small uncertainties in these estimates to vanish. It is prudent to act now by mitigating against greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the clear rise in sea-level that is rapid now but will only increase.

_________

1   J. A. Church et al., in Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, T. F. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex, P. M. Midgley, Eds. (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).

2  Fretwell P, Pritchard HD, Vaughan DG, Bamber JL, Barrand NE, Bell R, et al. Bedmap2: improved ice bed, surface and thickness datasets for Antarctica. Cryosph. 2013; 7:375–393.

3  Mouginot J, Rignot E, Scheuchl B. Sustained increase in ice discharge from the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica, from 1973 to 2013. Geophys Res Lett. 2014; 41:1576–1584.

4  Mitrovica JX, Gomez N, Morrow E, Hay C, Latychev K, Tamisiea ME. On the robustness of predictions of sea level fingerprints. Geophys J Int. 2011; 187:729–742.

5 Griggs, G, Árvai, J, Cayan, D, DeConto, R, Fox, J, Fricker, HA, Kopp, RE, Tebaldi, C, Whiteman, EA (California Ocean Protection Council Science Advisory Team Working Group). Rising Seas in California: An Update on Sea-Level Rise Science. California Ocean Science Trust, April 2017.

6  Hay C, Morrow ED, Kopp RE, Mitrovica JX. 2015. Probabilistic reanalysis of twentieth-century sea-level rise. Nature 517: 481-4).

7  IPCC. Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (eds.)]. Geneva, Switzerland. 2014.

8  Kopp RE, Horton RM, Little CM, Mitrovica JX, Oppenheimer M, Rasmussen DJ, et al. Probabilistic 21st and 22nd-century sea-level projections at a global network of tide- gauge sites. Earth’s Future. 2014; 2:383–406)

9  Sweet, W.V., R.E. Kopp, C.P. Weaver, J. Obeysekera, R.M. Horton, E.R. Thieler and CZ. Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States. 2017.

10  DeConto RM, Pollard D. Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise. Nature. 2016; 531:591–597.)

11  Dutton A, Carlson AE, Long AJ, Milne GA, Clark P, et al. 2015. Sea-level rise due to polar ice-sheet mass loss during past warm periods. Science 3491.)