PLANET EARTH
The collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is ‘unavoidable’
WORDS SASCHA PARE
Icicles hang from a melting iceberg on Petermann Island in Antarctica
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Winds can reach up to 200 miles per hour in some parts of Antarctica
The rate at which the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting will accelerate over the coming decades and is now an unavoidable consequence of climate change. Even if countries manage to cap greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the target adopted by world leaders in the 2015 Paris Agreement, melting will increase three times faster over the rest of the 21st century than it did during the 20th. “It looks like we’ve lost control of the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet,” said Kaitlin Naughten, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey. “If we wanted to preserve it in its historical state, we would have needed action on climate change decades ago.”