Not that it matters much for my understanding, as these numbers are too big for my brain to grasp anyway, but what does that unit prefix “tn” stand for?
While reading the article in my head I read it as “tera tonne” but wouldn’t that be “Tt”?
I hope it’s at least a metric tonne and not one of the other weird short or long tonnes.
I guess it means
freedomamerican tons.Then it would be saying 7.5tons tonnes which doesn’t make any sense.
SMH my head
Trillion perhaps?
A horrifying thought
Thanks! That must be it.
Looks like that’s the intention. The original paper uses Gt (gigatons): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36990-3
Judging by similar articles, it’s “7.5 trillion tonnes.” I assume metric tonne because of the spelling (usually I’ve only seen short or long ton spelled ton, although it may vary by region).
We’re fucked innit.
🔥 buckle up
ok, but how large is that compared to something we can visualize? like, a building, a city, an island, etc
It’s more than 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
About a centimeter (spread out across the oceans).
“1/361.8 mm of sea-level rise per Gt of ice loss” is the assumption they use for that.
Gt being 1/1000th of a Tn? or is Tn the small one?
Tera = 1000 gigas. Idk if they are doing a switch between metric and imperial tons as well but that difference is less than the margins of error anyways.
my math must be really off then. ( (1/361.8 mm of sea-level rise per Gt of ice loss) * 1000) * 7.5 = 2713mm = 106.83 inches = 8.9 feet. and the global ocean hasnt risen that much.
( (1/361.8 mm of sea-level rise per Gt of ice loss) * 1000) * 7.5 = 20.73mm. Which is about double what the actual paper says, so there’s probably some weird metric vs imperial issues.