Burning the world’s entire coal, oil and gas would melt the whole Antarctic ice-sheet, causing the oceans to rise by more than 50m. The researchers stated that to secure cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg or New York to be the future heritage, people need to avoid a tipping in East Antarctica.

Researchers have predicted that rise in sea levels is expected to reach 100 feet by the end of the millennium.

Oil, coal and gas companies are in the crosshairs worldwide, as the UN seeks to broker an agreement committing all nations to rein in greenhouse gases and activists press investors to pull money out of the fossil-fuel industry. In the event that all of the oil, coal and common gas that is accepted to be in the ground were spent throughout the following 500 years, we would discharge around 10,000 gigatons of carbon.

Fossil fuel companies defend their products as the most affordable energy option for developing countries seeking to pull billions of people out of poverty.

“Burning of accessible fossil fuel assets adequate to wipe out the Antarctic Ice Sheet“.

“This would not happen overnight, but the mind boggling point is that our actions today are changing face of planet Earth as we know it, and will continue to do so for tens f thousands of years to come”, Winklemann said.

If the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet all melted, it could contribute around 50 meters or 160 feet of sea level rise, according to Dr Stephen Rintoul, physical oceanographer and climate scientist in a report by NZ Herald.

The team’s model took into account the many factors that will impact Antarctica’s evolution over the next 10,000 years, and used these to try and predict not only how quickly the ice would melt, but also which areas would be affected first, taking into account interrelated variables like ocean currents, atmosphere composition, and snowfall. But greater warming could reshape the East and West ice sheets irreparably, with every additional tenth of a degree increasing the risk of total and irreversible Antarctic ice loss.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet stores water equivalent to 58 m in global sea-level rise.

But in the extreme case in which all fossil fuels are burned and temperatures rise by over 10C, sea level would rise by 30cm a decade. Unabated carbon emissions thus threaten the Antarctic Ice Sheet in its entirety with associated sea-level rise that far exceeds that of all other possible sources. “In a world beyond two degrees, long-term sea-level rise would likely be dominated by ice loss from Antarctica”.