Antarctica Research Paper

Youssef Adhoum, A4/B4 Class Mr. Hewett

Humans habits has lead to extreme pollution and continuous melting of Antarctica. In a couple millennia, Antarctica will be nothing but a plain sheet of ice. Due to no so environmentally friendly human habits, Antarctica has been exposed to over 992 million tons of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide (a type of greenhouse gas) itself isn't the cause of global warming. The sun is actually melting the ice, but the sun isn’t strong enough to melt the ice by itself, that is where carbon dioxide plays its role. Carbon dioxide acts as a trap for radiation from the sun, the Co2 lets the radiation in but barely lets any get out, thus melting the ice from the heat. Since 2010 approximately, 159 gigatonnes (159 billion

If you were to leave 95% of the gasses underground and keep the temperature of the ice below 2°C it would have similar results to not emitting any more carbon dioxide at all and would emit 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Leaving 90% underground would severely melt some parts of Antarctica and emit about 1000 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide but everything else would be up to par with previous scenarios. The next 3 are fairly bad for Antarctica. If you were to leave ¾ of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground and expose the remaining ¼ than you would have a steady 3 km thickness in the middle but very low thicknesses on the edge, about ½ a kilometer, and would emit about 2500 gigatonnes of CO2. Leaving half in the ground would have very little ice between the center and the edge but leave the middle with a steady 2 km and emit 5000 gigatonnes of CO2. Finally, to completely use all of the 11 trillion tons of remaining carbon dioxide would have almost everything to a plain sheet of ice but the middle with 2 km and degrading down to 1 km and back down to the sheet of