The last frontier crumbling

Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have continued to rise according to a new study led by the University of Exeter.

Eight ice shelves have fully or partially collapsed along the Antarctic Peninsula, and the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than virtually any place on Earth. The question now, is not whether Antarctica will begin to warm in earnest, but how rapidly.

The melting of Antarctica’s northernmost region — the Antarctic Peninsula — is already well underway, representing the first breach in an enormous citadel of cold that holds 90 percent of the world’s ice. No place on the fringes of Antarctica has warmed with the swiftness of the Antarctic Peninsula, which has seen winter temperatures rise by 11 deg F.

The most important link in the Antarctic food chain — ice-dependent Antarctic krill, on which just about every seabird or marine mammal in Antarctica feeds — also appears to be in decline. If global temperatures rise by 2 deg C, Adélie and emperor penguin colonies north of 70° South — comprising half of Antarctica’s 348,000 pairs of emperor penguins and three-quarters of the continent’s 2.5 million pairs of Adélies — are in jeopardy of marked decline or disappearance, largely because of severe decreases in pack-ice coverage and, particularly for emperors, ice thickness.