Global Warming just got a whole lot worse: 10 Foot of sea rise is possible

http://reverbpress.com/discovery/science/climate-change-just-got-whole-lot-worse/

Climate change, for those of us who are paying attention, may be the single greatest existential threat out there. This week we learned that it could be worse than we have ever imagined. Scientists have been researching the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica, and their findings are  grim:

The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It it is losing an amount of ice “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year,” notes the Australian Antarctic Division. That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s “a conservative lower limit,” says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

Think of the Totten Glacier as a cork in the bottle that is the ice sheet of East Antarctica. Remove that cork, which the rapid thinning of the glacier threatens to do, and we have a problem. Given that last year saw the discovery that the ice sheet of West Antarctica is, due to climate change, shrinking at a faster than expected rate, then the problem becomes very big indeed. The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, thought to be one of the least stable ice sheets, could cause a sea level rise of 11 feet. Now we see that the East Antarctic sheet is potentially just as unstable, and will produce a comparable sea level rise.