CLIMATE change is increasingly impacting the Earth’s ecosystems. Based upon scientific analyses, the observation is now acquiring special significance and invoking more serious concern over the pace and extent of that impact. Last week, this newspaper editorialised on the spread of severe drought conditions in regions geographically located far apart as the Horn of Africa and the South America-Caribbean.
The severity of such conditions and the vast expanses of land they struck, in addition of course to their grave humanitarian, economic and social consequences, augmented the decades-long call for an effective international response to Earth warming, widely considered the largest contributor to climate change.
International attention to severe droughts followed the spread of extreme heatwaves that spread rampaging wildfires and triggered work delays and other socio-economic hardships.
Over the past week, another form of the worrying effects of climate change has caught equally wide international attention. It’s what’s happening over there in Antarctica, the world’s southernmost and fifth largest continent which, though uninhabited except only temporarily by scientific research expeditions, hosts magnificent wildlife the most well-known species of which is that of the amazing penguins, together with beautiful whales, fish and invertebrates.
Literature on the geophysics of Antarctica has it that the continent is the iciest, coldest, driest, windiest and highest part of the Earth’s land mass; hence Britannica’s reference to it as “a continent of superlatives.” For these and other reasons, monitoring nature’s setting out there implies gathering signs of any change, existing or predictable, in the larger ecosystem on planet Earth.
There in Antarctica, “coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world’s largest ice sheet over the past 25 years,” so Reuters splashed the news of the striking observation on August 10, citing scientists’ analyses of NASA satellite images and the conclusions of the research study that raise new concern about how fast climate change is weakening Antarctica’s floating ice shelves and accelerating the rise of global sea levels.
Climate change, it logically follows, is leaving no part of the Earth’s landmass immune against its hazardous effects; hence also the necessity of sped up action to control global warming since it is the rising temperature of sea waters that accounts for much of world’s largest loss of ice sheets.
Be it in terms of pace or magnitude, the observed ice-melting in Antarctica serves as a fresh reminder to the world that the adverse effects of climate change are hazardous to ecosystems, no matter how far from the inhabited land mass ecosystems and sub-systems exist.
And with almost 90 per cent of all ice on Earth existing in Antarctica, the phenomenon deserves broader international concern and consideration at all climate action platforms.
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