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…

Northern Manhattan Wetland Faced with Climate-Change-Induced Erosion is Reimagined – Inside Climate News

Groundsel Tree (Baccharis halimifolia) Swindler Cove, Inwood Hill Park, New York City (by Steve Guttman CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

When the New York Restoration Project first started working in the late 1990s to clean the unnamed shoreline along the Harlem River in northern Manhattan, the intertidal mudflat and wetlands weren’t just a neglected area, but a former illegal dumping ground. How the cove, the largest wetland left in Manhattan, has become a bountiful greenspace where migrating birds, crabs, tadpoles and toads are all thriving, despite the existential threat posed by climate change in shoreline communities, is a story of robust community involvement and skillful coastline management…

The ‘Sisyphus of Trash’ Struggles to Clean Relentless Waves of Plastic From a New York Island’s Beaches – Inside Climate News

Fishers Island, New York (by Daniel Piraino CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

Michele Klimczak’s passion for cleaning the beaches of Fishers Island led to a full-time, year-round job, but she still can’t keep up with the flood of plastic waste.
In just three years, Michele Klimczak has picked, hauled, weighed, documented and sorted more than 32,000 pounds of garbage from the shores of Fishers Island, New York. She finds plastics stamped with product expiration dates going back two decades washed up all around the roughly four square mile stretch of land in the Long Island Sound…

Students and Faculty at Ohio State Respond to a Bill That Would Restrict College Discussions of Climate Policies – Inside Climate News

Ohio state seal on the library building, Ohio State University (by Dr. Bob Hall CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

Keely Fisher chose to pursue her Ph.D. at Ohio State University because she wanted to learn about climate change from a world-class faculty. Now one year into her program, she wonders if she belongs here.The problem has nothing to do with Ohio State and everything to do with the Ohio General Assembly and a proposal that would regulate higher education. The wide-ranging bill includes a provision that designates climate policy as a “controversial belief or policy” and says faculty must “encourage students to reach their own conclusions…