Santa needs jet skis

“Winter is coming.” Santa firmly places the right leg in the ice and checks that the surface is solid. Pulls a little in the beard. No melt. The runway for the sled is safe, as always and Santa is in a hurry as Christmas Eve approaches, as always.

Maybe Santa has noticed that something is going on and perhaps encountered NASA’s Operation IceBridge on one of his wild journeys high up in the skies. Or maybe Santa Claus sees the same thing that Google Earth simulates; the oceans slowly but steadily rising and penetrating into mega cities like Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, New York, San Francisco, London, Mumbai and Shanghai.

Venice’s boat builders and urban planners will be busy providing their advise to the world’s new canal cities if the earth warms up 4 degrees.

On Google Earth you can see Trafalgar Square underwater with a 4 degree temperature rise.

New names to learn

The fate of the polar bear is probably the most famous story of melting ice. The Greenland ice sheet that is disappearing (532 billion tonnes of ice disappeared in 2019) is also quite well known. The Northeast Passage that is becoming ever more ice-free attracts geopolitics and big money.

Lake Wedell and the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica are less known. But when we understand that what is happening there affects the water level where we live; Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, New York, San Francisco, London, Mumbai and Shanghai, they may become as famous as the polar bear.

The ice caps are in a way the opposite of the rainforests. At the same time, the two have something in common. They have been on earth for a very long time and now they may disappear. They are crucial to the climate and cannot be restored by humans. Life on earth will not be the same without them.

At any given time a group of researchers are dragging around their measuring instruments, wrapped in warm clothes with frozen nostrils like some ardent skier from the high north. On an icy deck on a research boat in the Arctic or with a cup of coffee in front of a screen where they control climate drones high up in the air, they collect numbers and data that they share with the world to the best of their ability.

Every now and then they get the world’s attention, but mostly their work remains something far away, both in time and distance.

Warm air flows the size of the Nile melt the ice

The other day I came across a recent report that tells us about atmospheric, feather-shaped air rivers. They are several thousand kilometers long and have been doing their thing all along, but now they have started to move south. This is bad news for the ice in Lake Wedell.

At 14.2 million square kilometers, Antarctica is the fifth largest continent, close to twice the size of Australia and includes Lake Wedell and the Thwaites Glacier. They are both suffering massive ice melting.

The air streams carry large amounts of water from South America towards the Southern Ocean and the continent. This is a normal pattern. The worrying part is that the streams are going further south. They will be longer, wider, more efficient and occur more often in the coming years.

Lake Wedell is covered with ice, but in 1973 researchers discovered large holes. They reappeared in 2017, but it was still unclear why. Now researchers have found that it is the hot, humid air from South America that is causing these holes. They are several thousand square kilometers in size. As the ice disappears, heat rises in the atmosphere which in turn affects the ocean circulation. It also affects the timing and volume of phytoplankton blooming. Phytoplankton is the basis for the food supply of fish and other marine animals.

Heat attack from beneath melt the ice

Antarctica holds 90 percent of all fresh water on earth. Ten percent of this is in the west where Thwaites is located. The ice in the east is higher above the sea, is over one and a half kilometers thick and has been there for millions of years. The Western one, on the other hand, is partly below sea level. Changes in the sea temperature directly affects the ice.

The Thwaites glacier is called the “doomsday glacier“, the “most dangerous” and “most important”. It is the size of England. The runoff from this alone accounts for 4 percent of the current sea level rise. If the entire glacier melts, the sea will rise by more than half a meter.

In 2019, NASA discovered a cavity of 57 square kilometers wide and 300 meters deep between the seabed and the ice – that is, almost the size of Manhattan. The researchers did expect to find a certain opening between the glacier and the seabed. But they did not expect that the opening would be this size. In just 3 years, 14 billion tonnes of ice have melted between the glacier and the seabed.

Such openings cause water to flow in and melt the glacier from below. The more water and heat that comes under the glacier, the faster it melts.

The earth does not need to be heated 4 degrees for Venetians to have a lot to do. It is already clear that in 30 years the sea will penetrate the whole of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. The heart of Shanghai will be flooded. The same will happen with Alexandria in Egypt. This happens with sea level rise of 30-50 cm. In 80 years, the increase is expected to double. The collapse of Thwaites will lead to another 60 centimeters of immediate sea level rise.

If the entire Arctic melts, the world’s oceans will rise by more than 30 meters on average. It’s serious. And Santa Claus? No, I do not believe in him. But I believe in human-made climate change documented by human-made measuring instruments.

Cover image: Santa Claus needs to have his feet dried before he gets back on our piano at home. Here he poses on the lake Bogstadvannet nearby our house as a model for this story.