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| Fig. 1 The Big Picture |
I. A Mythic Background
This series is about an almost inexplicable myth or hoax (The Young Old Sea Level Change Hoax).
So why is there a thermal expansion myth in the first place?
The trail of the infamous hoax or myth hearkens back to the daze of textbooks indicating that Eastern Antarctica is stable, thus the part of the ice sheet there and its tidewater glaciers there are not melting, and haven't for a gazillion years, to wit:
"But for years, scientists thought that the glaciers of East Antarctica—the hulking ice sheet on the other half of the continent, nearly three miles thick in some parts—were stable." (National Geographic, 2018).
"Scientists have long considered the East Antarctic ice sheet to be the stable 'sibling' to the much more unstable western ice sheet." (East Antarctic Ice Sheet Appears Stable, Forbes 2017).
"Licht led a research team into the Transarctic Mountains in search of physical evidence that would verify whether a long-standing idea was still true: The East Antarctic ice sheet is stable ... The East Antarctic ice sheet has long been considered relatively stable..." (Study validates East Antarctic ice sheet to remain stable, Science Daily, 2017).
"East Antarctica was supposed to be the stable side of the icy continent ... People think that East Antarctica is stable...” (Nature, 2018).
"... researchers believed East Antarctica was more stable than West Antarctica..." (NASA News, 2020)
(etc.). With practically all of the relevant scientific community expressing that dogma, the doctrine in the text books informed the oceanographic community to "move along, nothing to see here folks."
In the past few decades satellite photos and surface temperature data cemented this error into the researchers and the warming commentariat alike.
The information depicted at Fig. 1 details the reality that the largest sea level rise originates by ice melt at the part of Antarctica that "is stable" and won't melt.
But, it also shows the second largest sea level rise place of origin as well ("marine-based"), which in and of itself is capable of making civilization as we know it, extinct (some 8 meters of sea level rise ... compare Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).
That area is the realm of tidewater glaciers around all of Antarctica:
"The other component of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is so-called marine-based ice, which sits below sea level and is thus directly affected by the ocean ... Based on this evidence from the Pliocene, today’s current carbon dioxide levels are not enough to destabilize the land-based ice on the Antarctic continent,” said Boston College Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science Jeremy Shakun, a lead author of the report ... This does not mean that at current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, Antarctica won’t contribute to sea-level rise," Shakun said. 'Marine-based ice very well could, and in fact is already starting to—and that alone holds an estimated 65 feet of sea-level rise.'"
(Frozen Across Time, 2021, emphasis added). Oil-Qaeda humbly sponsored the ridiculous myth that does the pretzel-jerk to the oceanography trance concerning thermal expansion and contraction (Humble Oil-Qaeda).
II. It's The Ice-melt Stupid
The mythology lexicons we call textbooks injected a bed-time story into our cultural "consciousness," which seems outrageous to us when we find out that we know more about the backside of the Moon and Mars than we know about a great danger to our civilization:
When I found out "the reason" it surprised me too:
This is why we need this focus:
"The vast Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, plays a starring role in the future of climate change. The global oceans together absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat in the climate system and roughly three-quarters of that heat uptake occurs in the Southern Ocean. In addition, the global oceans absorb around 25 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and the Southern Ocean alone accounts for about half of the uptake of CO2.(Antarctica 2.0 - 3, quoting Climate Central). When the sea level is rising and the net result of thermal expansion / contraction totals is a minor player, [a small number], then melting tidewater glaciers and other melting ice in the Cryosphere quite obviously must be the major player.
Despite its critical role in our climate system, the Southern Ocean has gone almost completely unobserved.
Fig. 2 Circa the year 2000 Scientists have struggled to gather precise measurements because of the harsh environment and extreme remoteness. The changing dynamics of the Southern Ocean will in turn drive key aspects of our future climate, including how sensitive the Earth will be to further warming and increases in carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, improved observations are crucial to helping scientists understand and predict how our climate will change"
(Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization - 6). The reason has nothing to do with thermal expansion, it is all about ice melting.
III. Getting Well Grounded
The reality of East Antarctica is that it has an incredible grounding line size.
The length of the area where the grounding line of the East Antarctica's ice sheet's tidewater glaciers (where tidewater glaciers touch the ocean) is now known to be vast (see the "Grounding Line Length (meters)" column in the tables shown in the Dredd Blog post The Ghost Plumes - 8).
The ambient ocean water is melting that ice all along that vast grounding line area which is some "53,610 km long" (The Ghost Plumes - 4).
The sub-surface conditions are favorable for most or all of tidewater impacted ice that length to be subject to melting at and near the grounding line (Hot, Warm, & Cold Thermal Facts: Tidewater-Glaciers - 6).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
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