Day: March 25, 2022

An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said Friday.

The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared more than 40 degrees Celsius warmer than normal in some spots of East Antarctica. Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the past couple of years, and now scientists wonder if they have been overestimating East Antarctica’s stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula.

The ice shelf, about 1,200 square kilometers wide holding in the Conger and Glenzer glaciers from the warmer water, collapsed between March 14 and 16, said ice scientist Catherine Walker of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She said scientists have never seen this happen in this part of the continent, making it worrisome.

“The Glenzer Conger ice shelf presumably had been there for thousands of years and it’s not ever going to be there again,” said University of Minnesota ice scientist Peter Neff.

The issue isn’t the amount of ice lost in this collapse, Neff and Walker said. That is negligible. It’s more about where it happened.

Neff said he worries that previous assumptions about East Antarctica’s stability may not be correct. And that’s important because if the water frozen in East Antarctica melted — and that’s a millennia-long process if not longer — it would raise seas across the globe more than 50 meters. It’s more than five times the ice in the more vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where scientists have concentrated much of their research.

Helen Amanda Fricker, co-director of the Scripps Polar Center at the University of California, San Diego, said researchers have to spend more time looking at that part of the continent.

“East Antarctica is starting to change. There is mass loss starting to happen,” Fricker said. “We need to know how stable each one of the ice shelves are because once one disappears” it means glaciers melt into the warming water and “some of that water will come to San Diego and elsewhere.”

Scientists had been seeing this particular ice shelf — closest to Australia — shrink a bit since the 1970s, Neff said. Then in 2020, the shelf’s ice loss sped up to losing about half of itself every month or so, Walker said.

“We probably are seeing the result of a lot of long-time increased ocean warming there,” Walker said. “It’s just been melting and melting.”

Still, one expert thinks that only part of East Antarctica is a concern.

“Most of East Antarctica is relatively secure, relatively invulnerable and there are sectors in it that are vulnerable,” said British Antarctic Survey geophysicist Rob Larter. “The overall effect of climate change around East Antarctica is it’s chipping away at the edges of the ice sheets in some places, but it’s actually adding more snow to the middle.”

Last week, what’s called an atmospheric river dumped a lot of warm air — and even rain instead of snow — on parts of East Antarctica, getting temperatures so far above normal that scientists have spent the past week discussing it. The closest station to the collapsed ice shelf is Australia’s Casey station, about 300 kilometers away, and it hit 5.6 degrees Celsius, which was about 10 degrees warmer than normal.

And that, Walker said, “probably is something like, you know, the last straw on the camel’s back.”

Fricker, who has explored a different, more stable East Antarctic ice shelf, said an ice shelf there “is the quietest most serene place you can imagine.”

Source: Voice of America

A Spanish-language reporter who had been facing deportation since his arrest while covering an immigration protest in Tennessee has been granted asylum in the U.S., his lawyers said Thursday.

In a phone conversation with The Associated Press, Manuel Duran said an immigration court in Memphis granted him asylum, four years after he was arrested while doing his job for a Spanish language news outlet.

“I’m very happy for this victory after so much time fighting for this case to be resolved. I’m very emotional,” Duran, 46, said in Spanish. “My family is celebrating with me. We didn’t think it would happen because it was a difficult case.”

A native of El Salvador, Manuel Duran had fought for asylum since he was arrested while covering a rally protesting immigration policies in Memphis on April 3, 2018. Protesters had blocked a street in front a downtown courthouse to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination on April 4.

Protest-related charges were subsequently dropped, but Duran was picked up by immigration agents after he was released from jail and detained. Memphis police denied that Duran was targeted because of coverage that had been critical of law enforcement.

Duran had been held in facilities in Louisiana and Alabama until he was released from an Alabama detention center in July 2019 on a $2,000 bail set by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta had granted Duran an indefinite stay from deportation as his case was argued. The Southern Poverty Law Center and Advocates for Immigrant Rights had helped represent him.

“The positive resolution of my case today is a triumph in the fight to defend the First Amendment,” Duran said in a statement released by the center. “This victory is dedicated to all the journalists being persecuted in this moment, because no journalist should have to fear to do their job.”

Casey Bryant, executive director for Advocates for Immigrant Rights, said the immigration judge in Duran’s case “noted that the First Amendment is one of the most cherished rights of this nation and thanked Manuel for his bravery in daring to report corruption in El Salvador.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had said Duran was taken into custody because he had a pending deportation order from 2007 after failing to appear for a court hearing. Duran had said he did not receive a notice to appear in court with a time and date on it. Immigration activists and journalism organizations spoke out against his detention.

The Board of Immigration Appeals had reopened Duran’s case. Lawyers sought asylum, arguing that conditions had worsened for journalists in El Salvador and he could be in danger if he returns. The immigration board acknowledged that conditions for reporters had worsened in Duran’s home country since his initial deportation order.

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Associated Press Media Editors and other groups had filed amicus briefs on Duran’s behalf, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.

In a statement, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Memphis Democrat whose office was in contact with Duran and government officials since he was arrested, praised the court’s decision and Duran’s “commitment to the principles of a free press.”

Source: Voice of America