A disappearing island: ‘The water is destroying us, one house at a time’ – NPR

Beach near Freetown, Sierra Leone (by jbdodane CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

With nearly a third of its population living in coastal areas, and its heavy reliance on subsistence agriculture and fishing, Sierra Leone has been identified as one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change, despite having contributed just a tiny fraction of global CO2 emissions. With a GDP per capita of barely $2,000, it is also one of the least prepared to deal with those impacts….

Is Earth in a New Time Period: The Plasticene? – Frontiers for Young Minds

Geological Time Spiral (courtesy of United States Geological Survey, Public domain, via Wikimedia).

Earth has a special calendar called the geologic time scale…We are currently in the Holocene Epoch, but some scientists believe we have entered a new time called the Anthropocene or the “Age of Humans” because of our impact on the planet. One of the biggest changes humans have made is inventing and using plastic..Because plastic is now found everywhere, some scientists, like us, think we have entered a new stage in Earth’s history called the Plasticene…

Earth Just Had the Hottest 12-Month Span in Recorded History – Scientific American

"The Earth in 2100" Edited NASA visualization of climate change (specifically temperature) will probably look like by the year 2100 (by Stuart Rankin CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

As this past October came to a close, it marked the hottest 12-month period ever recorded, a new analysis finds. This stark milestone is the latest in a string of superlatives to emerge this year that show how much carbon pollution has warmed the planet—and how that trend is accelerating. It also comes just weeks before international negotiators are set to meet and hash out issues around achieving the Paris climate accord’s fundamental goal: limiting global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures…

Ancient Warning of a Rising Sea | Interactive – the Washington Post

Beach Grand L' Anse La Digue, Seychelles (by Falco Ermert CC BY 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

By studying the long-dead coral reefs, researchers have revealed not only how high sea levels can reach, but where the deluge will hit hardest. As temperatures surge and ice sheets melt, the fossils show, the oceans won’t rise evenly around the planet. Instead, the loss of polar ice will trigger profound changes in Earth’s gravity and shape — which, in turn, will create dramatic disparities in where ocean water flows…

Melting Ice Shelves

“Together, the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets contain more than 99 percent of freshwater ice on Earth. If they both completely melted, they would raise sea level by an estimated 67.4 meters (223 feet). Long-term satellite data indicate that through most of the twentieth century, the ice sheets made very little contribution to sea level, and were nearly in balance in annual snowfall gain and ice or meltwater loss. However, the stability of the ice sheets has changed considerably in the twenty-first century…” – Ice Sheets Today

Two Studies on Greenland Reveal Ominous Signs for Sea Level Rise – the New York Times

Streams and rivers that form on top of the Greenland ice sheet during spring and summer are the main agent transporting melt runoff from the ice sheet to the ocean (by Maria-José Viñas courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center CC BY 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Greenland’s mountain glaciers and floating ice shelves are melting faster than they were just a few decades ago and becoming destabilized, according to two separate studies published this week. The island’s peripheral glaciers, located mostly in coastal mountains and not directly connected to the larger Greenland ice sheet, retreated twice as fast between 2000 and 2021 as they did before the turn of the century, according to a study published on Thursday. “It got a lot harder to be a glacier in Greenland in the 21st century than it had been even in the 1990s,” said Yarrow Axford, a professor of geological sciences at Northwestern University and a co-author of the paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change…

What the Melting of Antarctic Ice Shelves Means for the Planet – Inside Climate News

Edge of an ice shelf in Adelaide Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula (by Maria-Jose Vinas courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center CC BY 2.0 DEED via Flickr).

Antarctica’s ice shelves are the gatekeepers between the continent’s glaciers and the open ocean. As the planet warms, these shelves shrink, exposing more and more ice, which leads to more melting. This frozen continent rests under a massive ice sheet averaging more than a mile thick. But a recent study in Science Advances found that Antarctica had 68 ice shelves that shrunk significantly between 1997 and 2021, adding up to about 8.3 trillion tons lost during that time…