This Week in Water

It's been a few weeks since our last installment, and plenty's happened. Let's get to it, shall we? We'll focus on the oceans and glaciers in this installment.

Scientists are using NASA ice-penetrating radar data to map the deep layers of the Greenland Ice Sheet for the first time.

The glaciated areas of the West Antarctic Ice sheet are now in "irreversible decline." That is to say, they are melting super fast and cannot be halted.

Antarctic drilling teams have found life in the grounding zone where ice sheets, the ocean, and the land converge.

Iceland is melting so fast, it's literally popping off the planet. And global warming is the culprit.

Alaska's shorelines are eroding into the sea, and villages are being lost.

Likewise, coastal Pakistani villagers are having to retreat inland as the seas gobble their land.

Anecdotes aside, scientists from Harvard and Rutgers have determined that the planet's seas are rising much faster than previously thought.

Meanwhile, the world's scallops and oysters are dying out, and nobody is quite sure why.

Warming sea temperatures are causing massive coral reef die-offs across the Northern Pacific in what could be the start of an historic world-wide bleaching event.

Some scientists believe "we may be sitting on a precipice of a major extinction event" due to unprecedented human damage to the world's oceans. When I say "believe", I don't mean in the sense of a blind faith in a transcendent being; I mean in the sense of a reasonable conclusion based on careful analysis of data from hundreds of empirical sources.