Page 56 - The Hunt - Summer 2020

The Arctic and Antarctic sheets have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice in three decades. Left unabated, the melting could lead to flooding that impacts hundreds of millions of people by 2100. Observations from 11 satellite missions monitoring the Greenland and Antarctic sheets show that the areas are losing ice six times faster than they were in the 1990s.
If the current trend continues, they’ll be
on track to match the “catastrophic” scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has sea levels rising an additional 6.7 inches by 2100. It’s been suggested that if Greenland were to loose its ice sheet, the effect could be a 24-foot rise in global sea levels. If the same were to happen in Antarctica, the 200-foot rise would be a far worse outcome.
Ice loss is already having ripple effects
around the globe. We’ve seen changing weather patterns, rising sea levels and more extreme natural disasters. The National Geographic Society has been monitoring the effects of sea rise over time. If its calculations prove accurate, parts of Wilmington will be inundated sometime over the next century.
54 THE HUNT MAGAZINE summer 2020