Consider This from NPR - Why Melting Ice In Antarctica Is A Big Problem For Coastal Texas

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

As Earth's climate warms, more ice is melting near the poles. And that is a huge driver of sea level rise around the globe. But some coastal communities are threatened by this more than others.Places like the Gulf coast of Texas, for example, are feeling the impact of melting ice in West Antarctica, thousands of miles away.NPR Climate Correspondent Rebecca Hersher traveled to Galveston, Texas, to see how that ice melt is affecting sea levels there and what experts are doing to prepare. This reporting is part of NPR's Beyond the Poles: The far-reaching dangers of melting ice series.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. That is the sound of members of NPR's climate team hiking Greenland's ice sheet. It's like climbing a mountain, and it's three times the size of Texas. Some of the ice is covered in little pools of water, like Swiss cheese. Other parts? Rushing rivers of meltwater. Greenland is losing roughly 280 billion tons of ice a year. Researchers are trying to figure out how quickly the planet's massive ice sheets and glaciers will disappear as temperatures rise.

But predicting that is complicated. This ice doesn't melt like the ice in your water bottle. Dust, algae, and snow all affect how the ice absorbs heat from the sun. Plus, we're talking huge chunks, the size of entire states, as it melts the ice cracks and falls into the ocean in large chunks. And all that melting ice means a lot of fresh water pouring into oceans, which could be harming the ocean's ecosystems and causing sea levels to rise everywhere. Now, some of this ice loss will continue no matter what at this point, regardless of what the world does to rein in greenhouse gas emissions in the short term. But if you look further in the future, it's a different story.

Decisions we make about those emissions now can still have profound effects later this century. Here's Twyla Moon, who is Deputy Lead Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. We are 110% not too late. If we take strong action to reduce climate change and to rein in greenhouse gases, we can preserve the vast majority. We will see retreat, but most of that ice we could expect to continue to be there for thousands of years. Consider this. Sea level rise is one of the major threats from climate change. But the ocean is not like a bathtub where the melting ice is the faucet and the water rises uniformly everywhere. The ocean has currents. It has topography. It's super complicated.

And so some places are threatened by sea level rise more than others. And the stakes are incredibly high. After the break, we hear why Texas is in the crosshairs, even though it is thousands of miles away from melting ice near the poles. From NPR, I'm Juana Summers. It's Wednesday, April 19th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. It's Wednesday, April 19th. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. It's Consider This from NPR.

We just heard about melting ice in Greenland. Now we go to the opposite end of the globe to listen to a sound very few people have heard. It's a recording from underneath a melting glacier in Antarctica. That whistling noise is a seal. And what sounds like rumbling thunder? Well, that's the most important part. That is the sound of the ice cracking apart, one of the most elemental sounds of climate change. This melting glacier in West Antarctica is threatening people who live thousands of miles away in sunny Texas. Rebecca Herscher from NPR's Climate Desk traveled to Galveston, Texas to explain that connection. We're far from Antarctica on an island in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is Galveston, Texas, gateway to one of the busiest ports in the country, home to a cruise terminal, a university, 50,000 residents and miles of sandy beaches. Like a lot of people here, Jerry Davila comes down to the water to relax. I love just staring at the water. It's a great stress reliever just to look at it. But families who have lived in Galveston for a long time also know that the water can be dangerous. It's the number one threat to the city's existence. So I'm June Collins Pulliam, and we are here in Galveston at our family home that's been here for about 120 years. 120 years because the house that used to be on this exact

spot was destroyed, swept away by the ocean during a storm in the year 1900. We actually have firsthand accounts of what happened from oral histories. This is Pulliam's great-aunt, Annie Smizer McCullough, who was in her early 20s when the storm hit. Oh, it was an awful thing, you want me to tell you, but no tongue can tell it. This recording originally aired in an NPR radio documentary. The sound of wind and water was added by producers. The wind was so strong and those waves was coming, so, well, I don't guess you want to hear all of that. Yes, we do. We want it. And the water was coming so fast.

The wagon was getting so so it was floating. McCullough barely survived. The family's home and most of the city were destroyed. At least 6,000 people died. It's still the most deadly weather disaster in recorded U.S. history. But the city survived, thanks in large part to a massive concrete wall that was built after the storm. A wall so tall that engineers said it would protect the city from the ocean forever. The wall is still here today. I drove out to look at it with Kelly Burks-Copes from the Army Corps of Engineers. So this is 17 feet high.

17 feet high and 10 miles long. It runs basically the length of the city. It's covered in murals. There's a four-lane road along the top. We're on the seawall. So the seawall is where the bulk of the condos are. This is where people come and stay in hotels. They walk across Seawall Boulevard, which is the road we're driving on. They drop down off of the 17-foot seawall on stairs, not jumping, and they go out to the beach. On a calm day, it's difficult to imagine that water could ever come over the top of this wall. It really does look like it will protect the city forever. And maybe it would have,

if not for climate change. But Galveston has already experienced two feet of sea level rise. That's some of the fastest sea level rise in the world. And that makes storm surge from hurricanes even more dangerous. We are in storm alert here at the Weather Channel as Hurricane Ike draws dangerously close to the upper Texas coast. In 2008, Ike narrowly missed Galveston. If the storm had hit the city directly, scientists say it would have overwhelmed the seawall. It was a wake-up call. The wall is too small, says Kelly Burks Copes.

17 feet tall, with sea level rise, that's still not enough. Because sea level rise in Galveston is accelerating. The most sophisticated estimates predict that in the next century, sea levels here will rise at least two additional feet, and perhaps 10 feet or more. It's a huge range, which brings us back to the melting glacier in Antarctica. Erin Pettit is the scientist who recorded the sound you heard at the beginning. When she made it, she was camped on top of one of the most dangerous glaciers in Antarctica. It's the size of Florida, and it's melting. I put hydrophones in the water underneath our camp.

Underwater microphones are one of the many tools Pettit is using to figure out how quickly glaciers like this one are melting. She and her team are also measuring giant cracks in the ice. They're getting longer by, you know, sometimes a mile a year, but it's not just a continuous, slowly incrementing thing. It sits there for a while, and then in just a week later, it'll be a mile longer. Like, everything seems okay, and then boom, a giant piece of ice falls into the ocean, unleashing more sea level rise. Pettit is trying to understand why that happens, so she can into the ocean, unleashing more sea level rise. Pettit is trying to understand why that happens so she can predict the future, figure out how quickly this glacier will splinter

and how quickly all that fresh water will be added to the ocean. And even though she works at the other end of the planet, her research has huge implications for Galveston because melting ice in West Antarctica disproportionately affects the Texas coast. Ben Hamlington studies sea level rise at NASA. He says the connection between Texas and Antarctica is kind of counterintuitive. Because you would think the areas closest to where that ice is being lost would feel it the most. And it's actually the further away you are, the bigger sea level rise you're actually going to feel. So being far away from Antarctica as it melts doesn't protect cities like Galveston. It actually does the opposite.

Also, scientists think that all the extra fresh water pouring into the ocean near Antarctica could disrupt a major ocean current in the Atlantic, which would cause even faster sea level rise on the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. Which is why people in Galveston and in other coastal U.S. cities really need to know how quickly Antarctica's ice will disappear, so they can protect themselves. That's what the Army Corps of Engineers is hoping to do in Galveston. The Corps has a plan to make the seawall taller, plus build new gates and dunes and other infrastructure to protect other parts of the city from rising seas. The plan would cost

at least $34 billion, although that's likely an underestimate. This will be the largest ever civil works project undertaken by the Corps of Engineers in its 220-year history. Kelly Burks-Kopes says the goal is to protect Galveston for another 100 years. And even though it's unclear how much sea levels will rise in the next century, they need to start building protections now, she says. Otherwise, the city is just a sitting duck. You can't be risk-adverse. You can't be paralyzed by uncertainty. You have to actually start making decisions and buy down the risk. That means designing infrastructure that's adaptable.

Unlike the seawall that was built after 1900, many of the upgraded walls and dunes can be made taller or wider if they need to be in the future. It's a nod to what we don't know about our changing planet and a vote for the survival of this city on an island. That was NPR's Rebecca Herscher. Earlier in the episode, you heard reporting from NPR's Lauren Sommer. You can see all their stories about the surprising effects of melting ice at npr.org slash icemelt. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation,

providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.