I – Chapter 19

0100 [00:54:55] "This brings me to the second canary in the coal mine. Antarctica. The largest mass of ice on the planet by far. A friend of mine said in 1978, "If you see the breakup of ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula, watch out, because that should be seen as an alarm bell for global warming."" (Al Gore)

0200 [00:55:15] "And actually, if you look at the peninsula up close, every place where you see one of these green blotches here is an ice shelf larger than the state of Rhode Island that has broken up just in the last 15 to 20 years. I want to focus on just one of them. It's called Larsen B. " (Al Gore)

0300 [00:55:32] "I want you to look at these black pools here. It makes it seems almost as if we are looking through the ice to the ocean beneath. But that's an illusion. This is melting water that forms in pools. And you you were flying it in a helicopter, you'd see it's 700 feet tall. They are so majestic, so massive. " (Al Gore)

0400 [00:55:58] "In the distance are the mountains and just before the mountains is the shelf of the continent there." (Al Gore)

0500 [00:56:05] "This is floating ice, and there's land-based ice on the down slope of those mountains. From here to the mountains is about 20 to 25 miles. Now they thought this would be stable for at lease 100 years even with global warming. " (Al Gore)

0600 [00:56:22] "The scientists who study these ice shelves were absolutely astonished when they were looking at these images. Starting on January 31 2002, in a period of 35 days, this ice shelf completely disappeared. " (Al Gore)

0700 [00:56:40] "They could not figure out how in the world this happened so rapidly. And they went back to try to figure out where they had gone wrong. And that's when they focused on those pools of melting water. " (Al Gore)

0800 [00:56:55] "But even before they could figure out what had happened there, something else started going wrong. When the floating sea-based ice cracked up, it no longer held back the ice on the land. And the land-based ice then started falling into the ocean. It was like letting the cork out of a bottle. " (Al Gore)

0900 [00:57:15] "And there's a difference between floating ice and land-based ice. That's like the difference between an ice cube floating in a glass of water, which when it melts doesn't raise the level of water in the glass, and a cube that's sitting atop a stack of ice cubes which melts and flows over the edge. " (Al Gore)

1000 [00:57:32] "That's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand. " (Al Gore)

1100 [00:57:40] "But I want to focus on West Antarctica because it illustrates two factors about land-base ice and sea-based ice. It's a little of both. It's a little of both. It's propped up on the tops of islands, but the ocean comes up underneath it. So as the ocean gets warmer, it has an impact on it. " (Al Gore)