Social media challenges are the unprepared hype with the internet. From the #KikiChalange to the #BirdBoxChallange, social media challenges never cease to flow. One such another challenge is that of the #TenYearChallenge where celebrities and social media users alike are posting pictures of themselves ten years ago and now. While some pictures show no-change in the ten years gap, some celebs like Mandy Moore presented raw, unfiltered picture of herself and how ‘time’ can be cruel to any person regardless of the ‘tag’ they have acquired in a society, which brings us to the only alarming issue time and we humans have done so far in 10 years-the meting of the ice in Antarctica.
A pair of new studies released on Monday shares the same ominous message – that the planet's ice is melting at an alarming rate, which is bad news for global sea levels. According to a study which looked at details of ice and snow from the entire continent of Antarctica since 1979, Antarctica's crucial ice sheet has been melting for the entire 39-year period, but that is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
"Antarctica is melting away," Rignot told CNN, "not just in a couple of places."
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the rate of that ice loss has not been consistent, with ice disappearing faster in each successive decade. Ice loss in Antarctica has increased from 40 gigatons (a gigaton is one billion tons) per year from 1979-90 all the way up to 252 gigatons per year from 2009-17, a 6-fold increase.
And that melt-rate has been accelerating in the most recent decades, up 280% in the second half of the nearly 40 years compared to the first half, Rignot and his colleagues calculated.
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The UN’s latest IPCC report also predicts that sea levels will rise as much as a meter by the end of the 21st century. But Eric Rignot, lead author of the new study, told Quartz in an email, “IPCC projections are very conservative and ignore potential contribution from East Antarctica.”
“The biggest uncertainty remains human actions. “This is not some inevitability. The actions we take play a fundamental role in shaping what these ice sheets will look like in a hundred years’’ says Twila Moon, a researcher at the US National Snow & Ice Data Center.
So, what have we done or are doing over the ten years to un-do the ‘done’ destruction?
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