One Ocean Cooler on the Rocks Please

The kids and I are fascinated by scientific news - I also like to keep the kids involved in their world so they will grow up to take care of the planet. I am also sick of politics and the daily depressing fare on the nightly news. Not that this is exactly GOOD news - but fascinating all the same - a huge chunk of Antarctic ice about 7x THE SIZE OF MANHATTAN collapsed this week, with an even bigger piece ready to go. It was on the Wilkins Ice Shelf - ice that was there for up to 1,500 years, according to scientists.

British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan attributed the melting to rising sea temperature due to global warming. Scientists said that while they were not concerned about a rise in sea level from the latest event, it was a sign of worsening global warming. It's got to be pretty hard for our administration to ignore global warming at this point - they refute it every time some cataclismic event happens. But one has to wonder - WHERE is this ice going to go? Eventually it just melts.

Such occurrences are "more indicative of a tipping point or trigger in the climate system," said Sarah B. Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. WHEN is the tipping point I keep wondering - the thing is - no one knows. Everytime something like this happens - there is much scientific arguing and revision of thought. It's hard to get a handle on it from my googling and research.

"These are things that are not re-forming," Das said. "So once they're gone, they're gone."

The rest of the Wilkins Ice Shelf, which is about the size of Connecticut, is holding on by a narrow beam of thin ice. Scientists worry that it too may collapse. Larger, more dramatic ice collapses occurred in 1995 and 2002.

Vaughan had predicted that the Wilkins shelf would collapse about 15 years from now. The part that recently gave way made up about 4% of the overall shelf, but it was an important part that can trigger further collapse. It's astounding the think of the SIZE of ice on Antarctic isn't it? Maybe there is some merit to our life existing on a speck in the universe much like the premise in Horton Hears a Who (we just saw the movie - which is great btw). Maybe Dr. Seuss was a visionary after all.

- LT