NEW YORK – Even as activists continue to face opposition-and even disdain-from climate deniers for attempting to raise awareness about the danger our planet is in, mounting scientific data shows that the world’s ice is melting at a rapid pace.
According to a study published earlier in 2021, global ice loss has increased rapidly over the past two decades, soaring from about 760 billion tons per year in the 1990s to more than 1.2 trillion tons per year in the 2010s. Meanwhile, a second, NASA-backed study on the Greenland ice sheet found that at least 74 major glaciers that terminate in deep, warming ocean waters are being severely undercut and weakened.
And yet, the extent of this effect-along with its implications for rising sea levels-is still being discounted by the global scientific community. “It’s like cutting the feet off the glacier rather than melting the whole body,” Eric Rignot, a study co-author and a glacier researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine, told The Washington Post.
“You melt the feet and the body falls down, as opposed to melting the whole body. I think this is an example that the current projections are conservative. As we peer below we realize these feedbacks are kicking in faster than we thought.”
A terrifying video from Business Insider, based on National Geographic’s estimation, paints a dark picture of the possible future of our planet. In the video, it is shown that lots of European cities-including Brussels and Venice-would be underwater if this worst-case scenario were to become a reality. Meanwhile, in Africa and the Middle East, Dakar, Accra, and Jeddah would suffer a similar fate. Millions of people in Asian cities like Mumbai, Beijing, and Tokyo would be uprooted from their homes by the rising sea level and be forced to move inland.
Read more at MSN.
