(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Genomic evidence tied to W Antarctic collapse via subglacial river from the Weddell to the Ross seas [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-10 'Smooth, stationary clouds are occasionally reported by the public as sightings of “unidentified flying objects.” But these clouds are not as mysterious as they might first seem. On December 29, 2020, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired these images of soft-edged clouds hovering over the Eisenhower Range of Antarctica’s Transantarctic Mountains. The range is bounded to the north by Priestley Glacier and to the south by Reeves Glacier, both of which feed into the Nansen Ice Shelf on Terra Nova Bay.' The mountains divide the ice cap between East and West Antarctica This is deadly serious. Due to the severity of the unrelenting and rapid decay of glacial ice unfolding in West Antarctica and the ramifications of its impacts on world order from a possible sea level rise of thirteen feet, a new study has been released to the public and the scientific community on the critical findings of a real and present danger to human civilization before even being peer-reviewed. The blockquote is from Harvard on the expulsion of water by the collapse of the ice shelves, in case you would like to hot list it for future reference on why the sea level rise will be worse than expected. The report, published in Science Advances, features new calculations for what researchers refer to as a water-expulsion mechanism. This occurs when the solid bedrock the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rebounds upward as the ice melts and the total weight of the ice sheet decreases. The bedrock sits below sea level, so when it lifts it pushes water from the surrounding area into the ocean, adding to global sea-level rise. The study screams immediate discussion, planning, and action needed for the world to focus on the imminent danger facing coastlines from the giant ice platforms collapse. Research from the study centers on the genetics of a small circumpolar benthic octopus. The Turquetts Octopus has been in Antarctica for over four million years. The most recent interglacial occurred 125,000 years ago, and the octopus DNA proved that populations "on opposite sides of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet had mixed." The only likely route was a seaway or channel deep below the ice giving the octopus a pathway between the south Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea, said Dr. Sally Lau, a geneticist and lead author of the study, reported by The Guardian. Turquet's octopus is a circumpolar species occupying the lowest water level under the ice of the Southern Ocean, the bottom of the sea floor. The species is small, only six inches in mantle length, and with a highly muscled structure of the animal's organs. Its gills, heart, digestive system, and reproductive glands are all crammed into the space behind the head. Graham Readfearn writes in The Guardian: Deep in the DNA of an Antarctic octopus, scientists may have uncovered a major clue about the future fate of the continent’s ice sheet – raising fears global heating could soon set off runaway melting. Climate scientists have been struggling to work out if the ice sheet collapsed completely during the most recent “interglacial” period about 125,000 years ago when global temperatures were similar to today. Readfearn notes the brilliance and originality of the study’s authors. He identified the diversity of the researcher's expertise, which includes "biologists, geneticists, glaciologists, computer scientists, and ice-sheet modelers." That is what I call thinking outside the box; these scientists are heroes. They discovered a big piece of the puzzle. Genetic samples were taken from 96 octopuses collected over three decades from around the continent. The octopus DNA carries a memory of its past, including how and when different populations were moving and mixing together, exchanging genetic material. The worry is that NASA scientist Eric Rignot in 2014, stated that the West Antarctic passed the tipping point. That means the region's melting is now self-sustaining. Remember, the catastrophic damage to Antarctica's softened ice shelves underbelly occurs below the surface from warming upwelling oceans. He said the route the octopuses are thought to have used is about 1,500 to 2,000 metres below the top of the current ice sheet. That channel would have been about 1,000 metres deep, but shallower nearer the edge. “It’s a sizeable ocean segment and a significant seaway for organisms to traverse,” he said. The article points to the IPCC that determined the last interglacial had similar temperatures as today, only warmer between .9 and 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Bindoff, who was not involved in the research, said using octopus DNA was “the last way I would have thought of having evidence of large sea level changes coming from the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet”. snip He said: “This paper is another piece of evidence that reduces that uncertainty of how this ice sheet has evolved in the past and that is critical for how we think about the future.” Prof Richard Alley, a leading ice sheet expert at Penn State university, said while there was evidence the ice sheet had collapsed millions of years ago, “we still aren’t sure whether the ice sheet deglaciated during the most recent interglacial”. However, Dr. Alley stated that this study only strengthens the argument that the most recent occurrence of major deglaciation occurred through this process. Transantarctic Mountains From the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea. The Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in the Weddell Sea is the largest ice shelf by volume in the entirety of Antarctica, and the Ross ice shelf is the second largest. If you draw a line between the two approximately parallel with the Transantarcic Mountains, it likely is the same path where the meltwater channel is believed to exist. The mountains are what divide Antarctic sectors into east and west. Scientists have made progress in understanding the dynamics of Antarctica. Still, the truth is we likely know more about the surface of the moon than we do the hydrology of the frozen continent. This video was published nine years ago; you can imagine the changes to that cavity since. In 2017 Kris Van Steeben requested research scientists at the IPCC’S sixth assessment report (Arc6) to look for specific signs of river channels between two ice shelf basins, Filchner and Byrd. Byrd includes the Amundsen Sea Embayment and glaciers Thwaites and Pine Island; We now know that this shelf is fracturing and cracking, which we know is melting from ocean upwelling and by geothermal sources (particularly upstream of Pine Island Glacier). After four years, they produced the findings that outside of the known channel in the Amundsen Sea, channels were found at Wilkes Land, Queen Mary Land, Queen Maud Land, George V Land sectors & between the Ross & Ronne-Filchner ice shelves. WASHINGTON, DC—Glaciologists have uncovered large valleys in the ocean floor beneath some of the massive glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. Carved by earlier ice advances during colder periods, the troughs enable warm, salty water to reach the undersides of glaciers, fueling their increasingly rapid retreat. There is still so much we need to know. We should deal with this looming apocalypse quickly. How can anyone do that with the total lack of attention by the media? “These oceanic features are several hundreds to a thousand meters deeper than what we thought before,” said Romain Millan, a graduate student in Earth system science at UCI and lead author of the new study. “It gives new insight into the future fate of these glaciers and the potential influence of warm ocean water that can melt away ice from below.” The discovery is the result of an analysis of gravity data from airborne NASA Operation IceBridge missions from 2009 to 2014 combined with ice motion measurements made by researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), UCI’s own mass conservation algorithm, and existing bed topography and ice thickness information. The new study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. In the new study, the researchers paid particular attention to sub-ice-shelf cavities in front of the Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers in an area known as the Amundsen Sea Embayment. By obtaining a more high-resolution map of the ocean floor below the glaciers, they were able to detect an unmistakable cavity beneath the Pine Island Glacier and a slightly shallower depression beneath Thwaites Glacier. It is essential to note that some of the ice above the Amundsen sea channel has collapsed. x And again. FLOR seems less stable than we thought. A permanent basal melt caused by a bidirectional current underneath the ice (shelf) between the western part of the PIG tongue & the eastern part of the TG tongue is pulling out the cork that protects the Byrd Subglacial Basin. pic.twitter.com/AgukyAg5Hl — Kris Van Steenbergen (@KrVaSt) January 30, 2023 x The ice coming out of FLOR buttressed the western part of PIG's calving front for decades. But now it's disintegrating at a dangerous rate. Watch the two icebergs in the middle of the GIF. The ice mass south of these two icebergs (upper right) is crucial to stabilize PIG tongue. pic.twitter.com/NA6lWUSxH5 — Kris Van Steenbergen (@KrVaSt) January 30, 2023 Van Steeben also reminds us that the Thwaites ice tongue may collapse by mid-March though it is difficult to tell where the tongue starts and the glacier begins. We don’t know that much. But we know we are in big trouble; we are all learning together. Besides The Guardian, where is the rest of the media? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/10/2152225/-Genomic-evidence-tied-to-W-Antarctic-collapse-via-subglacial-river-from-the-Weddell-to-the-Ross-seas Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/