The land of the mounties, recently the subject of an alarming new study, would seem to be in some trouble. The study, performed by Utrecht University's Jan Lanaerts, confirmed what many had only feared: If temperatures continue to warm at their current rate, 12.4 trillion tons of Canadian ice will have melted by the year 2100. Put another way, it means that in a mere 87 years, a whopping 18 percent of the current volume will have disappeared. The Dutch researcher Laenarts also found that the hypothetical thaw would cause the sea level to rise 35 millimeters. It may not sound like much, but it's not just Canada's ice that's melting, it's ice of the world. When combined, the rising sea level has the potential to create disasters of epic proportions, the likes of which have never been seen before. When published in Online Journal Geophysical Research Letters, the report cited Canada as the world's 3rd largest source of sea-level rise, behind only Antarctica and Greenland.Link
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/348880/description/News_in_Brief_Canadas_ice_shrinking_rapidly
Nature of Science Themes
Science is Subject to Debate and Tentative: This entire experiment was only a simulation. It is by no means a universally accepted model of exactly what's going to happen in the future.
Role of Motivation and Curiosity: Although I, personally, don't really care about Canada, I do care about how their melting ice will affect my grandchildren, and clearly I'm not the only one, since someone took the time to do this entire elaborate study.
This is a really scary thing to attempt to wrap your head around. The fact that in just 87 year, my children and grandchildren may have to confront this issue that we could have prevented in the first place is very unnerving to me. Luckily, it seems like scientists are starting to understand that and are working really hard to rectify the damage we have done. Nafisa Ibraham posted about an article that told about how scientists are using E.Coli bacteria to create fuel. Hopefully many more innovations like this can happen so we can save the beautiful planet we live on.
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