What Will Happen If Antarctica Melts?

When we talk about global warming at the poles, the Arctic tends to get more press than the Antarctic, because it's happening faster there than anywhere else on Earth. But Antarctica is still a juggernaut. Antarctica is approximated to contain 90% of world's ice and 70% of world's fresh water reserves. The amount of ice is so enormous that if a fraction of it gets melted into the water, the oceans can rise in feet. Current situation of global warming has lead to collapse of ice sheets in Antarctica, and this process is termed as irreversible by scientists, and believed that it may raise global sea level as high as 10 feet.
Greenland is also on its way to melting its reserves of ice. According to scientist the rate at which it is melting is 60 years ahead of what has been previously called as worst case.
After much controversies United Nations called the largest political summit on global climatic changes in 2014. In contrary to that people in United states are still debating on this issue of climate change. Even one of the senator termed global warming as a hoax. Still people are denying the current increase in global temperatures. According to Joe Bast, President Heartland Institute, climate change is not man made and there is no data that proves global warming is a crisis. But some politician are serious about the issue as Vice President Joe Biden, said "Denying climate change is like denying gravity", in his interview by VICE documentary series on HBO.
Getting to the science of this glacial melting in Antarctic continent, Dr. Eric Rignot says its because of stronger winds circulating around Antarctic continent that drives warmer water towards Antarctic ice. These warmer currents of water melts icebergs from below, thus collapsing the ice sheets. This is termed irreversible contrary to reversible that is the ice melting in summer and freezing again in winters.
In 2013 a iceberg of size equal to Singapore (length ~21miles) broke off the Pine Island Glacier in the western Antarctica. While other parts in western Antarctica are melting at higher rates was confirmed by British Glaciologist in 2014, including Pine Island Galcier, Thwaities Glacier, Haynes Glacier, Pope Glacier, Smith Glacier and Kohler Glacier in western Antarctica bordering with Amundsen Sea.
The solution that is proposed to deal with this situation by scientists and climatologist is to cut off carbon dioxide emissions. Dr. Andrew Clark, an Emeritus fellow, with experience of over 40 years of researching and 215 scholarly papers says about the climatic change as "To slow the pace of damage, maybe in very long term, but for generations to come there is red button and its going to continue."
The result of this melting is inundation of coastal areas. Bangladesh is at top of the list of countries that will face such situation, because of its low lying flat land. According to Dr. Atiq Rehman an environmentalist (who is a co-recipient of Nobel Peace Prize for  for his work on climate change), for 1meter rise in global sea-level, Bangladesh's 17% land is to be inundated for this rise in sea level. A total of 300million people are to suffer by end of this century due global sea-level rise.
Thus its time to make our contribution towards the saving of the environment. Everyone has to share his own part in saving the humanity from this crisis. Either it's decreasing the carbon based fuels or turning towards green energy solutions. Also we need to make up for the damages we had done in last decades.

The article originally appeared at Hotchpotch Post. It has been reproduced after taking permissions from Hotchpotch Post.