Bokelskere.no

The disintegration of one of the planet’s remaining ice sheets is often held up as the exemplary catastrophe. The West Antarctic ice sheet is, at this point, the world’s only marine ice sheet, meaning that it rests on land that is below sea level. For this reason it is considered particularly vulnerable to collapse. Were the West Antarctic or the Greenland ice sheet to be destroyed, sea levels around the world would rise by at least fifteen feet. Were both ice sheets to disintegrate, global sea levels would rise by thirty-five feet. It could take centuries for either of the ice sheets to disappear entirely, but once disintegration got under way it would start to feed on itself, most likely becoming irreversible.