From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Host Steve Curwood with Penn State geologist Richard Alley.
Antarctica’s ice shelves are the gatekeepers between the continent’s glaciers and the open ocean.
As the planet warms, these shelves shrink, exposing more and more ice, which leads to more melting. This frozen continent rests under a massive ice sheet averaging more than a mile thick.
But a recent study in Science Advances found that Antarctica had 68 ice shelves that shrunk significantly between 1997 and 2021, adding up to about 8.3 trillion tons lost during that time.
Richard Alley is a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, and he joined Living on Earth Host Steve Curwood to shed light on what all this melting at the south pole could mean for the…
