New York City and other coastal cities will reportedly be under water within a century – inundated by flooding from a fast-melting polar ice sheet.
It is not a question of if, but when a flood of biblical proportion will make cities hugging coastlines around the world uninhabitable, Ohio State associate professor Ian Howat told The Sun.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is breaking apart from the inside out, and its melt-off will cause sea level rises of up to nearly 10 feet, the U.K.-based newspaper reported.
"It's generally accepted that it's no longer a question of whether the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will melt, it's a question of when," Howat told the newspaper. "We may see significant collapse of West Antarctica in our lifetimes."
The pace and geography of the ice melt is significant; in 2013, a rift began forming in a valley on the Pine Island Glacier, and two years later, a 225-square-mile iceberg broke off and floated away, The Sun reported.
"Rifts usually form at the margins of an ice shelf, where the ice is thin and subject to shearing that rips it apart," Howat told the newspaper. "However, this latest event in the Pine Island Glacier was due to a rift that originated from the center of the ice shelf and propagated out to the margins."
"This implies that something weakened the center of the ice shelf, with the most likely explanation being a crevasse melted out at the bedrock level by a warming ocean," he added, The Sun reported.
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