Scientists have demonstrated that if all of Earth's current fossil fuel resources were burned at once, it would be enough to melt Antarctica.
If Antarctica melted it would likely cause sea levels to rise by between 160 and 200 feet, completely drowning numerous cities including New York and Washington D.C., Carnegie Mellon University reported.
"Our findings show that if we do not want to melt Antarctica, we can't keep taking fossil fuel carbon out of the ground and just dumping it into the atmosphere as CO2 like we've been doing," said Carnegie's Ken Caldeira. "Most previous studies of Antarctic have focused on loss of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Our study demonstrates that burning coal, oil, and gas also risks loss of the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet."
Antarctica is already losing ice, and complicated factors such as greenhouse gas-caused atmospheric warming will determine the fate of the crucial ice sheet. To make these new predictions, the researchers used models to simulate the Antarctic ice sheet's behavior over the next 10,000 years. The models suggested the West Antarctic ice sheet will become increasingly unstable if fossil fuel emissions continue at current levels for 60 to 80 years, and these levels represent only between 6 percent and 8 percent of the 10,000 billion tons of carbon available to us through fossil fuel reserves.
"The West Antarctic ice sheet may already have tipped into a state of unstoppable ice loss, whether as a result of human activity or not. But if we want to pass on cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg and New York as our future heritage, we need to avoid a tipping in East Antarctica," said Anders Levermann of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
The findings were the first to look at the effects of unrestrained fossil fuel burning on the Antarctic ice sheet. The model also showed that if global warming did not exceed the 2 degree Celsius target cited by policymakers, sea levels would likely remain manageable, but greater levels of warming could do irreparable damage to the East and West ice sheets. The average rates of sea level rise were estimated to be about one inch over the next 1,000 years, which would mean sea levels would rise by 100 feet by the end of the millennium. The researchers did not foresee a dramatic increase in sea levels for the rest of the current century.
"If we don't stop dumping our waste CO2 into the sky, land that is now home to more than a billion people will one day be underwater," Caldeira concluded.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Science Advances.
