By NEYDJA PETITHOMME

According to CNN, Antarctica has been experiencing unusual weather, which causes scientists questioning the icy continent and it existence in the near future.

On the west side of the icy continent called West Antarctic Ice sheet, scientists have found a 300,000-square mile portion of its perimeter melting.

“A melt of this magnitude is relatively rare in Antarctica,” said Julien Nicolas, one of the paper’s authors at the Ohio State University Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. “There have been about three or four events of this size in the last 40 years.”

This is problematic, if the melted slush and water refreezes it can leak into cracks and damage the inner structure of the ice.

“When it comes to the disintegration of the ice shelves, they are like corks in a bottle,” said Dr. David Bromwich, another author of the paper and a professor at the Ohio State. “They are holding back the contents of the bottle, in this case the ice sheet, and you take the cork away and everything flows out to the ocean.”

Action must to be taken, if we plan to see dramatically results in the near future, from recycling the basis of bottles, to being cautious while paying close attention to our environment.

“We don’t know the time scale of this,” he said. “There was one modeling study that showed quite dramatic changes on the scale of a few hundred years, and another scenario would be quite a slow change. But a foot of sea rise, or two feet, in the order of 100 years would be alarming.”

We live in a selfish generation, where adults, including millennials, have taken earth for granted. Eventually, if we the people, allow ourselves to continue to treat the earth as trash, it will bite us back.

Karma …

Once the ice is in the ocean, Bromwich says, it could cause sea levels to rise dramatically and rapidly.

“Rapidly,” of course, means something completely different on a geological time scale.