Melting Ice Sheet

The main objective for this program concerning melting ice sheets was to warn us that we must act now on the issue of global warming before it is too late and basically slow down the progression of ice sheets melting in Greenland and Antarctica that is causing sea level rise in low coastal area at an extremely fast rate that could potentially harm about half a billion people. If the ice sheets in both Greenland and Antarctica completely melted away into the ocean, the water would rise to about 200 hundred feet above normal sea level and this could be catastrophic long term for everybody on Earth. There was many topics incorporated into this program about ice sheets, but overall what the main discussion among the scientists was about how there

I personally didn’t know this at first and the only ice sheet I knew of was the one in Antarctica because I use to watch videos about it in Elementary school and that was a topic of discussion one day in class. To support this, the program began introducing this issue which was about Greenland and Antarctica and how the melting ice sheets are rising faster than we expected or predicted. Two of the scientists in the audio talked about how there is worst case scenarios involving the melting of these ice sheets but that some ice sheets are more stable than others. Although they agreed that the ice sheets were definitely melting, they were unsure about the rate of progression and the timetable for these events to occur. One scientist named Eric Rignot stated that there was a “net loss of 303 billion tons of ice per year and 1mm is a lot of rise for decades and centuries.” These scientists are not looking at the short term effects of sea level rise, but the long term effects which could be catastrophic. Another scientist named Richard Alley stated that “you want to be able to handle the problem, but not be too conservative,” which means that we should only control what we can control but not be too concerned with the things that are naturally occurring processes. If these ice sheets are really that big it

The reason I believe this is because there are videos on the ice caps of Greenland collapsing into the ocean, there is less snow fall across the globe than ever before, the temperature is rising but at a slow rate, there is way more earthquakes and hurricanes, and more pollution in the oceans and rivers based on my own observations. Also, I believe this is true because there have been much more deaths of polar bears in recent years because of ice caps collapsing and the earth warming. I know this based on previous knowledge from books I’ve read on Alaska and it clearly states that polar bears are starting to die off because they can no longer survive in their natural habitat. For example, say you are used to living in California where it is always sunny and warm year round, but then you decide to go on a vacation to Alaska where it is very cold almost all year long and rarely warm, would you be able to adjust to this change without getting sick or dying? My guess is maybe if you lived in an area previously that was similar to this but if you didn’t it would definitely take a toll on your body. In my opinion global warming will continue to occur, but we can do many things to slow it down. Personally I am very worried that we won’t make a change until it is too late and once we do there