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Channel / Source:
TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-12-22
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA5aEHbmJgw
do you remember thirty three degrees on the thirteenth of September that's amazing right but fewer of you perhaps remember that just three months before in June we got torrential rainfall in Flanders we did that much combined that much of one hundred and fifty million euros and that's in June alone was the same amount than the entire year of both this extremely late heat wave and he's
a torrential flooding stuck to experience this year gives are examples of extreme weather phenomena that occur progressively more frequently and a climate that gets rapidly warmer but there's another effect lurking around the corner these small affect the small eh phenomena they infect a certain amount of people because they cannot a cool their house enough or their basement gets flooded but this effect this impacts us all
at the same time and I'm talking about sea level rise sea levels have risen already with twelve centimeters since the nineteen fifties here at the coast of Belgium and did she loves are rising of course because the climate gets warmer devotions got warmer so D. expense green at the starting to melt earth it's bleachers are starting to melt and there's one other contributor and that's called
Antarctica we are slowly awakening this sleeping giants on the other side of the world Antarctica is a mess if I sheets it's around four hundred times as large as Belgium and it contains so much ice that if all this ice would disappear into the ocean and melt the sea levels would rise with sixty meters six zero of course this is science fiction this is a dystopia
and it won't happen in our lifetime but I would like to try to convince you that the Antarctica will play a bigger role for us and for the future generations Antarctica is basically a big rocky basin which is filled with ice in the interior I Antarctica %HESITATION has around four kilometers thick ice and that I schools from slothful that's turning into ice while around the continent
there's see I said see ice's frozen ocean water snowfall and because the ice a bit because the ice sheets is so thick in the interior the ice is starting to flow from the center to watch the margins the ice sheet where it gets include into contact with the ocean and where does that we call these things I shelves I shows or think plates of ice that
flowed into the ocean and I shows are extremely important for my story for the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet in fact Donald Trump which really like ice shelves because they are gatekeepers nor the border control off Antarctica they control how much ice up stream from the ice sheets flowing into the ocean and they do that by forming a barrier they resisted the ice from the
ice sheets from flowing into the ocean well I suppose if one of these ice shelves gets unstable get thinner then this border control disappears and then the ice is actually allowed to freely flowing to the ocean and that's it leads to sea level rise stood so this illustrates the diet it %HESITATION interaction between climate change climate warming I shelf instability CeeLo rice and actually this is
not some future I did this so this has already happened and this has happened in this tiny area here with the rug do notice with the red arrow colts the Larsen B. ice shelf in fact the Larsen B. ice shelf is no longer with us and twenty two thousand two infants just a few weeks time in February and March this entire chunk of ice with the
look of the size of a Belgian province more or less actually disappeared broke off and disappeared in the ocean and was replaced with ice filled ocean water back then in two thousand two the scientific community was completely %HESITATION surprised we didn't know where discrete from and we only understood until we were looking at the surface of the sci shelf and when we looked when we did
this we saw this clear blue meltwater lakes on the surface of the Larsen B. ice shelf and D. smelt water lakes day are important since day can and because these fractures into the ice shelf creating a shelf instability and he smells like it a melt water lakes where dare because prior to two thousand two there was a series of warm summers creating so much meltwater that's
was not able to re freeze and full form these lakes so Antarctica looks like a very remote place but effect is remarkably similar to Europe or to any other continents being that's the western parts on the left side for you is very different than the eastern side on the right side east Antarctica is actually much bigger and much cooler than west Antarctica so until recently re
thought that's all the smelter other processes I shelf instability was limited to the western part but we were wondering her fist is also possible in east Antarctica in the bigger I sheets and that led us to organizing an expedition to east Antarctica funded by the InBev brewery here and live in and we attempts on the who what boudoir I shift the king Baudouin I shelf yes
named after our former king and that's because this area is actually Belgian territory it's very near to the Belgian research base Princess Elizabeth and we kept on the ice shelf two summers in a row %HESITATION and we did not only camp of course we were there for science we did scientific measurements weather measurements no measurements and so on and we learned a lot about what happens
what's the local conditions were it was that's the next here howling winds and the and the little visibility is in the poor weather conditions the cold of the snow but many people as we ask before I before have been off the words how cold was actually actually it wasn't cold at all most mornings I woke up in my think sleeping bag of sweating because the sun
was heating up my tent it was actually very very warm sometimes very warm but we didn't really expect what he saw when we were traveling on the ice shelf and I hope this will work okay there we go so at some point we were traveling on the ice shelf and you hurt water flowing and then when we approach this we saw this huge meltwater stream this
is all melted ice and snow flowing with twin twenty thousand liters per second pastors and when we followed this water downstream so we follow the water and we saw at some point it disappears actually it disappeared into the ice shelf in a big hole in the ice shelf and this is called the mood and a moon eyes typically found on Greenland's maybe on west Antarctica but
that's never seen on east Antarctica and this whole actually drains all the water disk twenty thousand meters per second all the way from the surface of the ice shelf down the bottom of the I. shelf and perhaps as you can see here all the way into the ocean what we also did we %HESITATION drilled into the have snow on the ice shelf we met mechanically drilled
into a shelf so what we are interested in is the climate a in the past the deeper we go into the ice shelf further we go back in time and this is what you typically see when you do this when you take out the score of snow and ice there's snow layer coming from the winter snow and ice they are coming from the summer melts and
then a new snow snow day are coming from the winter but this is not what we saw when we were drilling in the rubble lie I shift we didn't see snow or ice least Dixie as you can see here water coming out the drill liquid water and we work then we are turning down the drill as you will see there was not a nice gore offered
as snow or ice it was actually slash as we call it is with no filled with water and then when we looked into to bore all we saw what they're spending in the borough so we were really anticipate what's it's going on there so we decided to lower a camera in the call there's enough we're going down into the bore hole first we see lots of
ice with air bubbles very typical four meters deep at some point we come in is submarine world becoming a soup glacial lake or out of one kilometer across four meters deep far as the camera I can see so we're actually standing on the subsurface league four meters deep below the surface and these are the kind of melt water features that we have never expected to see
in Antarctica so we were really a we we were really amazed by it is but it's expected spectacular of course but scientists we are wondering what does it mean a well it means this actually this meltwater dismantled the processes they are linked to %HESITATION I shelves becoming unstable and ice shelves becoming unstable makes Antarctica unstable Antarctica is not less Vegas what happens in Antarctica does not
stay there so I just lost from Antarctica will automatically leads to sea level also here in Flanders and this is the most state of the art contribution into the future from a talk out to sea level rise so you can see on the vertical axis sea level rise in meters going five hundred years into the future until twenty five hundreds and you can see tree lines
and the street lights are not there by accident they are there because they represent our decisions our emissions the red line represents dystopia the wave as we continue now while the black line that represents a situation where you quickly transition to sustainable society and blue is somewhere in between and just to give you some numbers in one hundred years from now it varies between more than
one meter according to the red scenario and just a couple of centimeters and a blue and black scenario and it twenty five hundreds five hundred years from now we're talking about less than twenty centimeters and the black line and almost twenty meters twenty meters of sea level rise in five hundred years from Antarctica only and this is how it looks like in Flanders twenty meters all
the blue area will be flooded well basically all offenders will be flooded most of it at least system look up your hometown to see if it's holding up if you're living in living or in Brussels and you're sick of standing in the surfing jam going to the coast it won't be necessary anymore you can go by bike and we won't have our famous Belgian problem because
Flanders will be gone and well known you will be safe but on the downside course we will lose all our historical cities Bruschi will be under water get that answer as well so this these are the possible consequences of our emissions if we supposedly transition to wake a quick quickly transitioned to green society we had and up with a few centimeters a few tens of centimeters
this is how fifty centimeters looks like Wade out taking additional measures such as increasing the height of the dikes and that's possible it's costly but it's possible so it comes down to us how Antarctica will evolve in time and how Flanders who looked like into into the future so how can we decide on this we can decide on the way we move we can decide on
the way we live and where we live how we live and we can decide on how we eat probably all of you know that transports constitutes a huge a fraction of the global greenhouse emissions it's thirteen percent cars trucks trains ships and planes thirteen percent of global CO two emissions but fewer of you know is that only cattle contributes five percent more than the truth older
transport combined only up almost twenty percent global greenhouse emissions and that's because these animals are there because of us because we are notorious meat eaters we eat eighty kilograms of meat more as a Belgian per year and that's forty percent more than we actually need that what that is what would that what is actually healthy it's also forty percent of our total suit to consumption for
food and equivalent to driving around with a fuel efficient car for one year fifteen thousand kilometers of course providing that author of the car is correct we also need a lot of space for our meter rich diet we need around half a football field for each of us and we don't need to this football fields to grow our fruits are our vegetables we need this because
we need to grow the food for the animals the animals eight eat the food retains the animals suppose we get rid of the meat we can provides it went we can provide the the land use for twenty of us if we don't eat this meat anymore actually I tend to feel guilty when I ruin the smell the dirt the fresh air in our bedroom at nights
and I'm probably not the only one and the reason why the smell is there is so because of messy and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas but if in fact you and I shouldn't be so sure civic shouldn't feel so guilty because costs are much more efficient in this than us in fact because he met one hundred and twelve twenty kilograms per year off me
and methane and that's fifteen times as much as sheep one hundred times as much as a pick and one thousand times as much as you are me so livestock contributes nineteen ninety five percent of our annual meet methane emissions so what's on our everyday plates really determines how much offenders will be below sea level in the future so N. week by eating meat we contribute immensely
to global warming to land degradation and eventually the sea level rise but there are of course alternatives you don't need to become vegetarian right you could change for instance to chicken and that's already ten times less detrimental to the environment done red meat so LS meets or meet the society that's maybe my personal utopia but I think as it's a citizen I hope it will be
possible and as a scientist I know it will have a cooling effect on the climate so reducing your meat consumption will not only decrease your personal impact on the environment but also unless older many other incentives to combat climate change free it doesn't cost you anything so in conclusion as if you haven't head enough reasons to reduce your meat consumption I just give you another one
