The results point to a greater range of possibilities, from ice sheet change that decreases sea level by 3.1 in (7.8 cm), to increasing it by 12 in (30 cm) by 2100, with different climate scenarios and climate model inputs. The regional projections show the greatest loss in West Antarctica, responsible for up to 7.1 in (18 cm) of sea level rise by 2100 in the warmest conditions, according to the research.

“The Amundsen Sea region in West Antarctica and Wilkes Land in East Antarctica are the two regions most sensitive to warming ocean temperatures and changing currents, and will continue to lose large amounts of ice,” said He?le?ne Seroussi, an ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Seroussi led the Antarctic ice sheet modeling in the ISMIP6 effort. “With these new results, we can focus our efforts in the correct direction and know what needs to be worked on to continue improving the projections.”

Different groups within the ISMIP6 community are working on various aspects of the ice sheet modeling effort. All are designed to better understand why the ice sheets are changing and to improve estimates of how much ice sheets will contribute to sea level rise. Other recent ISMIP6 studies include:

• How historical conditions and warming ocean temperatures that melt floating ice shelves from below play a significant role in Antarctic ice loss? (Reese et al, 2020)
• How sudden and sustained collapse of the floating ice shelves impact the Antarctic ice sheet as a whole? (Sun et al., 2020)
• How to convert large scale climate output into local conditions that ice sheet models can use? (Barthel et al, 2020; Slater et al; 2019, 2020; Nowicki et al., 2020, and Jourdain et al., 2020)

“It took over six years of workshops and teleconferences with scientists from around the world working on ice sheet, atmosphere, and ocean modeling to build a community that was able to ultimately improve our sea level rise projections,” Nowicki said. “The reason it worked is because the polar community is small, and we’re all very keen on getting this problem of future sea level right. We need to know these numbers.”

The new results will help inform the Sixth IPCC report scheduled for release in 2022.

Results from this effort are in line with projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2019 Special Report on Oceans and the Cryosphere. Meltwater from ice sheets contribute about a third of the total global sea level rise. The IPCC report projected that Greenland would contribute 3.1 to 10.6 inches (8 to 27 cm) to global sea level rise between 2000-2100 and Antarctica could contribute 1.2 to 11 inches (3 to 28 cm).

These new results, published this week in a special issue of the journal The Cryosphere, come from the Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (ISMIP6) led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The study is one of many efforts scientists are involved in to project the impact of a warming climate on melting ice sheets, understand its causes and track sea level rise.

“One of the biggest uncertainties when it comes to how much sea level will rise in the future is how much the ice sheets will contribute,” said project leader and ice scientist Sophie Nowicki, now at the University at Buffalo, and formerly at NASA Goddard. “And how much the ice sheets contribute is really dependent on what the climate will do.”

“The strength of ISMIP6 was to bring together most of the ice sheet modeling groups around the world, and then connect with other communities of ocean and atmospheric modelers as well, to better understand what could happen to the ice sheets,” said Heiko Goelzer, a scientist from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, now at NORCE Norwegian Research Centre in Norway. Goelzer led the Greenland ice sheet ISMIP6 effort.

With warming air temperatures melting the surface of the ice sheet, and warming ocean temperatures causing ocean-terminating glaciers to retreat, Greenland’s ice sheet is a significant contributor to sea level rise. The ISMIP6 team investigated two different scenarios the IPCC has set for future climate to predict sea level rise between 2015 and 2100: one with carbon emissions increasing rapidly and another with lower emissions.

In the high emissions scenario, they found that the Greenland ice sheet would lead to an additional global sea level rise of about 3.5 inches (9 cm) by 2100. In the lower emissions scenario, the loss from the ice sheet would raise global sea level by about 1.3 inches (3 cm). This is beyond what is already destined to be lost from the ice sheet due to warming temperatures between pre-industrial times and now; previous studies have estimated that ‘locked in’ contribution to global sea level rise by 2100 to be about a quarter-inch (6 millimeters) for the Greenland ice sheet.

The ISMIP6 team also analyzed the Antarctic ice sheet to understand how much ice melt from future climate change would add to sea level rise, beyond what recent warming temperatures have already put in motion. Ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet is more difficult to predict: In the west, warm ocean currents erode the bottom of large floating ice shelves, causing loss; while the vast East Antarctic ice sheet can gain mass, as warmer temperatures cause increased snowfall.

Story Source:

Materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. Original written by Kate Ramsayer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study surveyed more than 500 students when they started college, each year during college, and 20 years later on their goals related to being creative, having a successful career, having a family, being wealthy, or being active in religion or politics. The goals of these UC Berkeley students — about half were still responding after two decades — remained relatively stable over time, though there were some notable changes.

“This study was a unique opportunity to examine how individuals’ personalities and major life goals were related to each other across two decades of life,” said Olivia E. Atherton, the lead author of the study and former doctoral student in psychology at UC Davis. “We found that, in many ways, one’s personality shapes the types of life goals that are valued, and as a result of pursuing those goals, personality changes.”

Successful people stress goals

Various enormously successful people, such as Albert Einstein, have noted the importance of goals, researchers said. Einstein once said, for example: “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.” The personality characteristics he possessed were likely the driving force behind the types of goals he aimed to achieve, researchers said.

“Einstein’s tendency to be creative, curious, and intellectual likely fueled his scientific goals, as well as his more aesthetic goals, such as his passion for playing the violin,” the study authors wrote.

The study, “Stability and Change in Personality Traits and Major Life Goals from College to Midlife,” was published in late August in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Besides Atherton, co-authors include Richard Robins, a professor of psychology who is director of the UC Davis Personality, Self and Emotion Lab; as well as Emily Grijalva, University of Buffalo; and Brent W. Roberts, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The personality traits examined in the present study are termed the “Big Five” in psychology. They are neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness. These five traits broadly capture most of the ways in which people differ from one another, and they are related to a wide range of important life outcomes.

Researchers examined these traits, along with aesthetic goals (wanting to be creative and artistic); economic goals (wanting to have a successful career and be wealthy); family/relationship goals (wanting to be married and have children); hedonistic goals (wanting to have fun and experience pleasure); political goals (wanting to have influence in public affairs); religious goals (wanting to participate in religious institutions); and social goals (wanting to help others in need).

.” .. We found that, on average, individuals increased in agreeableness and conscientiousness, decreased in neuroticism, and showed little change in openness to experience and extraversion from age 18 to 40,” researchers said.

Some goals become less relevant

They also found that people place less importance on all goals over time, suggesting that individuals winnow the goals they value with age, presumably because they are achieving milestones associated with those goals and thus, the goals become less important as a result.

“By identifying their own personal strengths and limitations, middle-aged adults may place less importance on certain major life goals because some goals may no longer be viewed as self-relevant,” researchers said.

The authors did find that personality traits are related to major life goal development over time. For example, individuals who become more agreeable, kind and compassionate, also tend to place more emphasis on social and family/relationship goals over time. And, individuals who become more responsible, organized and self-controlled tend to value more economic and family goals.

But could these instincts, developed to protect us from illnesses, generalize into avoidance of healthy individuals who simply look, speak or live differently?

Jessica Stephenson, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, coauthored a paper exploring the answer, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B.

One example noted in the study showed that black garden ants exposed to a fungus clustered together in groups much smaller than researchers could predict by chance, which effectively limited the spread of disease. Similar behaviors seen among 19 non-human primate species were also credited for lowering direct spread of parasites.

Human beings share these same biological impulses to separate into modular social groups. However, when pathogens are spreading, humans tend to also adopt a set of behaviors that are “hypervigilant and particularly error prone,” the researchers wrote.

“It’s interesting and really disappointing,” Stephenson said. And as COVID-19 continues its spread, humans are even more susceptible to the impulse.

“During epidemics, humans tend to become overly sensitive, so any sort of physical abnormality that somebody has suddenly becomes a potential indicator of infection. We become much more bigoted, we pay way more attention to things that differentiate people from what we perceive as our own phenotype. People who look different from us and sound different from us, which, of course, leads to a lot more xenophobia,” said Stephenson, who runs Stephenson Lab of Disease Ecology and Evolutionary Parasitology at Pitt.

A prior Stephenson study published in The Royal Society Biology Letters in November 2019 outlined how individuals differ in their response to potential contagion. In both humans and the guppies she studied, the individuals most susceptible to the disease showed the strongest avoidance.

During that study, male guppies were placed in a large tank, flanked by a smaller one containing a group of three female guppies that were visibly infected with parasites. Many males preferred to spend time near the female guppies, despite the risk of contagion. But some male guppies strongly avoided the other fish. The socially distant male guppies were later shown to be highly susceptible to worm infections.

Stephenson said human beings are generally “normal social animals in many of our behavioral responses to infectious diseases.” But, if humans choose social urges over infection control, efforts such as global disease surveillance and centralized public health responses could be wasted, she said.

“That the vast majority of our species has largely squandered the potential payoffs of these benefits is again consistent with other social animals: the cost of social distancing itself can outweigh the cost of contracting the disease,” Stephenson said.

But humans have a leg up on fish: access to information and means of virtual communication. Stephenson’s 2020 study noted that synchronous communication, virtual or not, can mitigate some of the effects of confinement. Computer-mediated discussions can also promote more equal participation from minority groups.

“For some, no amount of Zoom and FaceTime can make up for the lost benefits of social interactions. These frustrating, if wholly natural, behavioral decisions will result in the persistence of COVID-19 until the advent of perhaps our greatest advantage over other species facing emerging infectious diseases: vaccination.”

“We shouldn’t discriminate against different groups in our social distancing, or in our efforts to work together to beat the virus,” she added. “But I think our natural, evolved tendencies would be to associate only within our ingroups. We have to fight that natural antipathy towards people who differ from ourselves, and not shut down.”