Kim Robinson - New York 2140

Melting all the ice on Antarctica is a big job, however, and will not happen fast, even in the Anthropocene. But any Antarctic ice that slides into the ocean floats away, leaving room for more to slide. And in the twenty-first century, as during the three million years before that, a lot of Antarctic ice was piled up on basin slopes, meaning giant valleys, which angled down into the ocean. Ice slides downhill just like water, only slower; although if sliding (skimboarding?) on a layer of liquid water, not that much slower. So all that ice hanging over the edge of the ocean was perched there, and not sliding very fast, because there were buttresses of ice right at the waterline or just below it, that were basically stuck in place. This ice at the shoreline lay directly on the ground, stuck there by its own massive weight, thus forming in effect long dams ringing all of Antarctica, dams that somewhat held in place the big basins of ice uphill from them. But these ice buttresses at the ocean ends of these very huge ice basins were mainly held in place by their leading edges, which were grounded underwater slightly offshore—still held to the ground by their own massive weight, but caught underwater on rock shelves offshore that rose up like the low edge of a bowl, the result of earlier ice action in previous epochs. These outermost edges of the ice dams were called by scientists “the buttress of the buttress.” Don’t you love that phrase?

So yeah, the buttresses of the buttresses were there in place, but as the phrase might suggest to you, they were not huge in comparison to the masses of ice they were holding back, nor were they well emplaced; they were just lying there in the shallows of Antarctica, that continent-sized cake of ice, that cake ten thousand feet thick and fifteen hundred miles in diameter. Do the math on that, oh numerate ones among you, and for the rest, the 270-foot rise in ocean level is the answer already given earlier. And lastly, those rapidly warming circumpolar ocean currents already mentioned were circulating mainly about a kilometer or two down, meaning, you guessed it, right at the level where the buttresses of the buttresses were resting. And ice, though it sits on land, and even on land bottoming shallow water when heavy enough, floats on water when water gets under it. As is well known. Consult your cocktail for confirmation of this phenomenon.

So, the first buttress of a buttress to float away was at the mouth of the Cook Glacier, which held back the Wilkes/Victoria basin in eastern Antarctica. That basin contained enough ice all by itself to raise sea level twelve feet, and although not all of it slid out right away, over the next two decades it went faster than expected, until more than half of it was adrift and quickly melting in the briny deep.

Greenland, by the way, a not-inconsiderable player in all this, was also melting faster and faster. Its ice cap was an anomaly, a remnant of the huge north polar ice cap of the last great ice age, located way farther south than could be explained by anything but its fossil status, and in effect overdue for melting by about ten thousand years, but lying in a big bathtub of mountain ranges which kept it somewhat stable and refrigerating itself. So, but its ice was melting on the surface and falling down cracks in the ice to the bottoms of its glaciers, thereby lubricating their descent down big chutelike canyons that cut through the coastal mountain-range-as-leaky-bathtub, and as a result it too was melting, at about the same time the Wilkes/Victoria basin was slumping into the Southern Ocean. That Greenland melt is why when you looked at average temperature maps of the Earth in those years, and even for decades before then, and the whole world was a bright angry red, you still saw one cool blue spot, southeast of Greenland. What could have caused the ocean there to cool, one wondered through those decades, how mysterious, one said, and then got back to burning carbon.

So: the First Pulse was mostly the Wilkes/Victoria basin, also Greenland, also West Antarctica, another less massive but consequential contributor, as its basins lay almost entirely below sea level, such that they were quick to break their buttresses and then float up on the subtruding ocean water and sail away. All this ice, breaking up and slumping into the sea. Years of greatest rise, 2052–2061, and suddenly the ocean was ten feet higher. Oh no! How could it be?

Rates of change themselves change, that’s how. Say the speed of melting doubles every ten years. How many decades before you are fucked? Not many. It resembles compound interest. Or recall the old story of the great Mughal emperor who was talked into repaying a peasant who had saved his life by giving the peasant one rice grain and then two, and doubling that again on every square of a chessboard. Possibly the grand vizier or chief astronomer advised this payment, or the canny peasant, and the unquant emperor said sure, good deal, rice grains who cares, and started to dribble out the payment, having been well trained in counting rice grains by a certain passing Serbian dervish woman. A couple few rows into the chessboard he sees how he’s been had and has the vizier or astronomer or peasant beheaded. Maybe all three, that would be imperial style. The one percent get nasty when their assets are threatened.

So that’s how it happened with the First Pulse. Big surprise. What about the Second Pulse, you ask? Don’t ask. It was just more of the same, but doubled as everything loosened in the increasing warmth and the higher seas. Mainly the Aurora Basin’s buttress let loose and its ice flowed down the Totten Glacier. The Aurora was a basin even bigger than Wilkes/Victoria. And then, with sea level raised fifteen feet, then twenty feet, all the buttresses of the buttresses lost their footing all the way around the Antarctic continent, after which said buttresses were shoved from behind into the sea, after which gravity had its way with the ice in all the basins all around East Antarctica, and the ice resting on ground below sea level in West Antarctica, and all that ice quickly melted when it hit water, and even when it was still ice and floating, often in the form of tabular bergs the size of major nations, it was already displacing the ocean by as much as it would when it finished melting. Why that should be is left as an exercise for the reader to solve, after which you can run naked from your leaky bath crying Eureka!

It is worth adding that the Second Pulse was a lot worse than the First in its effects, because the total rise in sea level ended up at around fifty feet. This truly thrashed all the coastlines of the world, causing a refugee crisis rated at ten thousand katrinas. One eighth of the world’s population lived near coastlines and were more or less directly impacted, as was fishing and aquaculture, meaning one third of humanity’s food, plus a fair bit of coastal (meaning in effect rained-upon) agriculture, as well as the aforementioned shipping. And with shipping forestalled, thus impacting world trade, the basis for that humming neoliberal global success story that had done so much for so few was also thrashed. Never had so much been done to so many by so few!

All that happened very quickly, in the very last years of the twenty-first century. Apocalyptic, Armageddonesque, pick your adjective of choice. Anthropogenic could be one. Extinctional another. Anthropogenic mass extinction event, the term often used. End of an era. Geologically speaking it might rather be the end of an age, period, epoch, or eon, but that can’t be decided until it has run its full course, so the common phrase “end of an era” is acceptable for the next billion or so years, after which we can revise the name appropriately.

But hey. An end is a beginning! Creative destruction, right? Apply more police state and more austerity, clamp down hard, proceed as before. Cleaning up the mess a great investment opportunity! Churn baby churn!