Ahmed Mourad (Cairo)
The severe climatic changes that the world is currently witnessing are causing an acceleration in the melting of icebergs spread across the globe, which threatens many disasters that create severe damage.
10% of the land area
The iceberg is formed due to the freezing of fresh river water, and it was usually previously part of a frozen river, then separated from it, and turns into a huge mass of ice heading towards the oceans and lakes to float on, and it takes many shapes and bodies, it may be in the form of a giant mountain, or blocks Flat glaciers with steep sides known as glaciers, and most of the icebergs are separated from the Greenland ice sheet located between the North Pole and the Atlantic Ocean.
Glaciers make up about 10% of the Earth’s area, and own about 69% of the world’s fresh water, and due to global warming, these rivers have recorded high rates of decreasing and melting in recent years.
3 terms and 4 colors
A glacier must meet several conditions in order to be classified as an iceberg, including: its length should not be less than 16 feet above sea level, its thickness range from 98 to 164 feet, and the area covered by the ice should not be less than 5,382 square feet. Icebergs appear in several colors, most notably white ice, black ice, blue ice, and dark ice. Icebergs are of particular interest to climatologists who study them as they break up in order to understand the obvious effects on glacier detachment and to predict how they will respond to global warming.
demise within 10 years
Scientists estimate that major changes are taking place in the Alps in the German state of Bavaria, where the glaciers in the German Alps are melting very quickly, and they are expected to completely disappear within ten years. According to a report published by the German regional government in late April 2021.
The German government report confirmed that climate change is hitting the glaciers in the German state of Bavaria, and that the last of these rivers may disappear within ten years from now, contrary to what scientists expected about the resilience of these glaciers until at least 2050.
The report indicated that the five glaciers in Bavaria have lost about two-thirds of their glacier mass over the past ten years. It also lost about a third of its area, which is equivalent to the area of 36 football stadiums.
world without ice
On August 19, 2019, Iceland announced the melting of the first glacier in the country known as “Okjokal”, which lost its status as an iceberg in 2014, knowing that this mountain is no longer moving on top of a volcano that has been anchored on it for about 700 years.
Some scientists in Iceland put up a mural commemorating the iceberg that read: “In the next 200 years, it is expected that all of our icebergs will follow suit.”
melting ice = high temperature
According to estimates by some climate scientists, it is likely that the melting of billions of tons of ice spread on the Earth’s surface will cause a rise in the Earth’s temperature by 0.4 degrees Celsius.
The melting of the ice raises the temperature through a process known as the surface albedo coefficient, whereby dark soil or seawater that absorbs heat, or both, is replaced by bright, heat-reflecting ice. That is, the decrease in ice leads to a decrease in sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface to space, and thus causes a rise in temperatures.
The melting ice also causes an increase in vapor levels in the atmosphere, which increases the effects of gaseous emissions, and subsequently a rise in temperatures.
Arctic sea ice levels have been declining every decade since the late 1970s by more than 10%, and icebergs have lost about 250 billion tons of ice annually in the past century.
sea level rise
A scientific study published by the journal Nature on April 28, 2021 confirmed that the accelerated melting of rivers and glaciers over the past two decades has contributed to more than 20% of sea level rise.
According to scientists’ calculations and data, Antarctica and the island of Greenland contain enough frozen water to raise the water levels in the oceans by 60 metres.
3.5 trillion tons of ice lost
Data provided by the European Space Agency showed that the ice sheet has lost 3.5 trillion tons of ice since 2011, and that the amount of ice that has melted on Greenland over the past decade has raised global sea levels by one centimeter and increased the risk of floods worldwide.
The ice sheet above the island contains enough frozen water to raise oceans about six meters globally, and meltwater runoff in Greenland has increased by 21% over the past four decades. One study indicated that a third of the ice lost by Greenland in the past decade was recorded during two hot summers in 2012 and 2019.
The biggest iceberg
The iceberg known as “B15” located in Antarctica is the largest iceberg in the world. It was discovered in the year 2000, and it is about 295 kilometers long, 37 kilometers wide, and covers an area of 11,000 square kilometers.
Completely vanished mountain
The iceberg known as “A68” is one of the most famous icebergs that melted completely in the Atlantic Ocean, and nothing remains of it. 2020 entered the ocean, splitting into smaller blocks until finally disintegrating in April 2021.
The area of the mountain when it was separated from the ice shelf was about 5800 square kilometers, and its thickness was 350 meters, and scientists estimated its weight at about one trillion tons.
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