*Thursday, January 31st, 6:30 – 7:30 Center for the Arts, Screening Room*
Of Ice and Fire: Polar Impacts of Global Warming
Earth’s icy regions are showing the biggest and most rapid changes they
have seen since the end of the last ice age. Large areas of the Arctic
ocean are now open water in summer. In Greenland and Antarctica, huge
floating ice plates, some the size of small countries, have
disintegrated — in some cases, within just a few weeks. As these
floating ramparts break apart, glaciers pent up behind them accelerate,
rapidly moving ice on the land into the ocean. This scenario that will
be repeated on a larger and larger scale as the Earth’s warming
continues in the coming decades. The surprising rapidity of change in
the poles has stunned glaciologists and confounded attempts to
accurately forecast rates of ice decline and sea level rise. We know
this: events in the farthest reaches of the world are proceeding at an
alarming rate.
The only plausible cause of this accelerated, unprecedented warming is
greenhouse gas emissions. Our air is now loaded with these, at levels
not seen in 650,000 years. The source of the most important of these
gases, carbon dioxide and methane, are a product of humanities greatest
technological achievements: the use of fire, and the development of
agriculture. We will review trends in these gases, their relative
contribution to global warming, other possible contributors to warming,
and what to do about it.
Bio:
Dr. Ted Scambos is the Lead Scientist at the University of Colorado’s
National Snow and Ice Data Center, a group funded by NASA, the NSF, and
NOAA to monitor Earth’s icy regions. Dr. Scambos specializes in the use
of satellite images of sea ice and the ice caps, developing methods to
measure ice speed, elevation, temperature, and other changes. He has
been on 9 expeditions to Antarctica.
