A recent report says that a large ice shelf about 155 square miles has broken away from the Ward Hunt area in Canada. These far off events seem like only tabloid print in newspapers, designed to catch the eye of the reader and increase the popularity of the agency. We feel the same when there are reports of earthquakes and tsunamis in distant countries. But the problem with this bit of news is that it concerns all of us. It is not that nature or the world or our mother earth has come to harm. It is you, me and our kith and kin that suffer from this event.
The breaking of this white mass that has stood against time unwavering for 3000 years should be enough of a proof to suggest the possibility of a catastrophe. Even at the cost of repetition, I want to write about this ice breaking and its global effects,. The phenomenon of global warming is the cause of this event.
Most of you know about global warming. It is simply started as the sudden rise in the temperature of the earth. Sudden because, the rise of temperature that has taken place in the last 100 years has not been duplicated in over a history of over 650000 years. That is like walking for 10 miles on the flat ground and then the next step takes us into an abyss. When temperature increases, as you know ice converts into water. This is what happens to our ice caps in the poles.
The ice when it turns to water does so first in the areas where it is thinnest. This freshly melted ice, as it is heavier than the surrounding ice, goes below the unmelted ice chunks and thus creates a watery bed for these massive mountains of solid water. These now can freely slide into the water. What happens when we add an ice block to water? — the water level rises. On the global scale, this rise is manifested as the ocean encroaching onto seashores.
People would have been content to think that, the melting of such great masses of ice would take a long time and so the rise of sea level would be that much gradual. Meanwhile mankind would surely think of a way out. But these recent phenomenon, like huge masses of ice suddenly sliding into the oceans, will cause sudden avalanches of water rushing and devouring the coastal cities and countries. Most of the flourishing nations tend to accumulate near the great water bodies and therefore, this encroachment by water will undoubtedly eat up all our brothers and sisters in these coasts.
Source: msnbc