"DOOMSDAY GLACIER"

IS THIS HELPING ANYTHING?

• The “Doomsday Glacier” Is Irreversibly Melting, Researchers Say “It could fall apart quickly, in decades.”

• More surprises await scientists at Antarctica’s “Doomsday Glacier”

First, the “doomsday glacier” meme is one the vast majority of researchers reject. Still, if it all did come to pass but you’re not hiding in a bunker or moving to the forest to live off grid during COVID – a dangerous, BSL3 airborne virus that is coming to get you – then some coastal flooding or even major global disruptions and mass migrations probably aren’t going to upset you either.

Second, the article confuses (deliberately?) “ice sheet”, the real substance and volume, and “ice shelf”, the thin floating fringy bits that have made it off land and out onto the sea. That’s not helpful. Even if you’re the rare person to read the whole article and not just the title and skim a couple of lines, you are likely left more confused than you went in.

Third, the quote highlighted at the top of the page in the above article is “It [the ice shelf] could fall apart quickly, in decades.” But the actual quote from the researcher is “It could fall apart quickly, in decades, or it could be centuries. And the only way to really know that is through this research.” As in, we don’t know but are trying to find out for sure. This is just the sort of thing rampant in journalism and science reporting. In fact, it’s so common that nearly every scientist and researcher ever quoted has a story about having their work misrepresented, even after a two hour conversation.

SO HOW DO THINGS ACTUALLY LOOK?

The world is commonly more interesting than we would allow it to be. And that’s just what we’ve been seeing in the Antarctic! The trend down south has, well, continually confounded scientists. Just about every climate model indicated Antarctic sea ice should have evaporated already; and yet sea ice has been stable there and even increased over the years. (Just like many polar bear populations.) In fact, all-time record maxima were recorded in 2012, 2013, and 2014. That was not supposed to happen. And that’s why we only ever hear about doomsday glaciers and killer icebergs.

If you go look, things haven’t gone as we insisted up north either. Though this year’s November average Arctic sea ice extent was below the 40 year average (and the reductions we’ve seen don’t look good) this November saw more than a million square kilometers (an area larger than British Columbia) above the record November low set in 2016. Turns out complex dynamic systems are just that.

ALTERNATIVES

For me, what's most upsetting about all of this is that the noise and disinformation so frequently arrives from sources who frame themselves as an antidote to such. These writers and editors can be found on social media talking about a sudden updraft of conspiracy theories or that seemingly every non-expert has become Trumpian, claiming that scientists, journalists, and an entire professional class are pushing “fake news”. The problem is that most communicators are clearly not trying to sort fact from fiction or merely deliver their best attempt at such. I’ve been diligently reading, studying, and writing school papers and personal essays on these themes regularly since 2007. And I am confident when I say that the amount of deliberately misleading garbage being peddled as gold (“in decades” vs “decades or centuries”) is so tremendous, unapologetic, and never found to be corrected, that all the conspiratorial thinking out there is perfectly warranted.

While it may have been called for in other decades and centuries, luckily you don’t have to reject all expert opinion or entire institutions here in the 21st century. A solid alternative to the unreliable reporting is to find researchers who make predictions that turn out to be correct and/or just seek out anyone who will merely make the uncommon move of admitting when they’re wrong and who is quick to loudly and publicly correct the record when they realize their error. You can find them on Twitter. You can dig up their blogs. You can hear them on podcasts. They are out there. Go find them.

For actual information from the folks doing the work on sea ice and glaciers, see:

• The National Snow and Ice Data Center — University of Colorado Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) — https://nsidc.org/learn

• The International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (funded by the US National Science Foundation and UK National Environment Research Council) — https://thwaitesglacier.org