The eleventh day of Gheorghemas will grace your gleeful existences before the end of the weekend (but not before the release of the new Weeknd), but to tide you over, we've got a story that'll make you want to party like it's 1999, or at Ground Zero. Whatever one does when the world's end is nigh,
We're a deeply unserious people, and most of the time I'm cool with that. Whimsy is our stock in trade, after all. But one would think that we'd be paying more attention to the news that came out of the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) annual meeting in December. (Doesn't help that most Republicans hate unions and science - doubly whammy.)
Researchers presented findings at the AGU suggesting that the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is deteriorating so rapidly that it might collapse completely as soon as three years from now.
That big bastard is 80 miles wide and over 3,000 meters deep. It's known in scientific circles as the Doomsday Glacier, because of a belief that its demise could set in motion a climatic cycle that might result in the collapse of the entire Antarctic glacial shelf, and with it a radical reshaping of the global climate. Now, researchers from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) - which is a terrible name for a band - believe that we're irreversibly headed that way.
Among other outcomes, scientists believe that the collapse of Thwaites could raise global sea levels by as much as two feet, which would swamp coastal habitats around the world. And since Thwaites is an influential sort of fella (I assume glaciers are dudes. Hard to really check.) it's possible that it'll drag neighboring glaciers with it as it melts from above and below, which could raise sea levels by as much as ten feet. We'd better get as much OBFT joy in as possible over the next couple of years, and I wouldn't recommend investing in real estate in Miami, if I were you.
It's the end of the world as we know it, friends. And I feel fine, if slightly hungover.
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