Scientists have demonstrated that if all of Earth's current fossil fuel resources were burned at once, it would be enough to melt Antarctica.
If Antarctica melted it would likely cause sea levels to rise by between 160 and 200 feet, completely drowning numerous cities including New York and Washington D.C., Carnegie Mellon University reported.
"Our findings show that if we do not want to melt Antarctica, we can't keep taking fossil fuel carbon out of the ground and just dumping it into the atmosphere as CO2 like we've been doing," said Carnegie's Ken Caldeira. "Most previous studies of Antarctic have focused on loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Our study demonstrates that burning coal, oil, and gas also risks loss of the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet."
Antarctica is already losing ice, and complicated factors such as greenhouse gas-caused atmospheric warming will determine the fate of the crucial ice sheet. To make these new predictions, the researchers used models to simulate the Antarctic ice sheet's behavior over the next 10,000 years. The models suggested the West Antarctic ice sheet will become increasingly unstable if fossil fuel emissions continue at current levels for 60 to 80 years, and these levels represent only between 6 percent and 8 percent of the 10,000 billion tons of carbon available to us through fossil fuel reserves.
"The West Antarctic ice sheet may already have tipped into a state of unstoppable ice loss, whether as a result of human activity or not. But if we want to pass on cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg and New York as our future heritage, we need to avoid a tipping in East Antarctica," said Anders Levermann of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
