The abundance of liquid water recently discovered beneath the world's largest ice sheets is fraught with powerful destabilizing effects from the ongoing global warming. Now, even without the melting of these ice masses, they can slide into the seas, catastrophically raising the level of the World Ocean.
"Lubrication" of sliding
For millennia, melting ice has been offset by heavy snowfalls. Now, in the era of global warming, heated air intensifies the melting of snow, and the resulting water “lubricates” the ice masses sliding over land into the ocean. The ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, ready to start such a slide, could raise the level of the oceans by more than 60 meters as a result!
Global warming is heating Antarctica faster than any other region on our planet. Greenland is also catching up with her. Nearly all of the Greenlandic ice sheet rests on a rocky base, and this shield slides into the ocean half as melt water and half as glacial ice.
Antarctica researchers have discovered an extremely extensive network of subglacial lakes and rivers under the Antarctic ice sheet, helping to "blur" the path of ice to the ocean. The four largest subglacial lakes are of particular concern, as they are responsible for the increasingly accelerated ice slip. This acceleration has been observed for almost a thousand kilometers!
Causes of anxiety
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The processes described above are of great concern to researchers for several reasons. Firstly, almost a third of the world's population lives within only one hundred meters above sea level, that is, people live in a risk zone. Secondly, most of the largest megacities in the world have settled near the shores of the seas and oceans. Thirdly, every 200 cubic kilometers of ice sliding from land into the sea raises the level of the World Ocean by 30-40 centimeters. It would seem an insignificant value, but if you take into account the water "locked" in the three largest ice massifs of the planet (West Antarctica, Greenland and East Antarctica), the situation will look dire! If the entire ice sheet of West Antarctica disappears, then the level of the World Ocean will rise by 6 meters, if the same happens with Greenland, then the level will rise by 7 meters,and in the case of East Antarctica, this figure will be 60 meters!
According to a number of experts, the weather on our planet is now the warmest in the last 1300 years! And in Russia, for 20 years in a row, the average annual air temperature has been kept above the climatic norm! In the next hundred years, warming is estimated at 2-4 degrees annually … Since 1991, we have been keeping statistics on dangerous natural phenomena caused by global warming. Since the mid-1990s, their number has increased by 6 percent annually. It is not for nothing that recently, due to the warming in the Arctic, the polar station "North Pole-35" had to be abandoned!
Ways of salvation
Experts are unanimous in the belief that the main way to save us from global warming is to switch to waste-free types of production. According to scientists, the energy sources of the second half of this century should be represented by nuclear reactors, hydrogen-fueled engines, wind power generators, solar panels, and wave and tidal power plants. All these energy sources must be united into a common network that enmeshes our globe.
According to the calculations of specialists, even a threefold increase in the number of nuclear power plants (NPPs) could reduce the annual emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in an amount from one to two billion tons! Now the planet's nuclear energy generates one sixth of the world's electricity production. And by 2050, the demand of the world economy will increase by one and a half times. Hundreds of nuclear power plants that do not add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere could satisfy it.
Natural gas, which has a low carbon monoxide content, is the most preferred conventional power plant in terms of reducing gas emissions. True, the prices for electricity generated in this way depend on the cost of natural gas, which has only been increasing in recent years.
Disposal of radioactive waste
An important problem in the development of nuclear energy is the reliable disposal of radioactive waste. No country in the world has permanent storage facilities for the burial of these dangerous substances for many years. The most common way of burying them is in geological layers at depths of up to several hundred meters. The main purpose of such storage facilities is to reliably prevent leakage of radioactive materials from the inside for thousands of years! One of the first such repositories in the United States is being built in the Jutta Mountains (in the state of Nevada), but construction is hampered by the flow of groundwater into the favorite cave. The commissioning of this storage facility is scheduled for 2015. Perhaps the first exemplary permanent storage of this type will appear in Finland. Its advantage will be a great depth of occurrence (up to half a kilometer). If all goes according to plan, construction of the storage facility is expected to be completed by 2020.
Disappointing forecasts
As a result of global warming, climatic zones can move to the north by 500 - 1000 kilometers! In the Southern Hemisphere, they will move the same distance to the south. By 2020, all the snow in the Alps can melt. Glaciers also began to actively melt. Sometimes, at an altitude of 2-3 thousand meters in the mountain valleys, whole lakes of melt water are formed. One such lake with a volume of 3 million cubic meters had to be drained so that the water would not break through a thin dam!
The southern flank of Europe is increasingly covered by the sands of the Sahara. Winds blowing from the Libyan desert bring millions of tons of sand from the Mediterranean, covering cars, trees, crops with a yellow coating. If the heat spreads from the equator to the poles at the same rate, then the average annual temperature in all climatic zones will rise by 3-5 degrees! With regard to Russia, this means that snow in Saratov and Voronezh will be as rare as it is in Florence today!
Vladimir KRUGOV