Greenland’s ice has begun to melt faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years, with research showing that sea levels will rise and have a significant effect on ocean currents.
According to a paper published in the Natural Journal, the new parameters show any matching of any melting in the geological record for the Holocene period.
According to one study, increasing snow loss from Greenland by the end of the century caused 2 cm. And 10 cm. Meanwhile, sea levels are expected to rise.
Jason Briner, a professor of geology at the University of Buffalo and lead author of the paper, said: “We have changed our planet so much that the melting rate of ice sheets will be higher than we have seen in this century. The natural variability of ice sheets over the past 12,000 years. “
These changes, over a relatively short period of less than a century, appear unprecedented. Greenland’s ice sheet shrunk 10,000 to 7,000 years ago and has been slowly accumulating over the past 4,000 years. The current melting will reverse that pattern and in the next 1,000 years, if global heating continues, the massive ice sheet will disappear altogether.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise sharply, the melting rate could be four times faster than anything found in the last 12,000 years.
“We are increasingly certain that we will experience unprecedented rates of lack of ice from Greenland, unless there is a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” wrote Yndi Aschwenden of the Geophysical Institute at Fairbanks University in Alaska in a commentary on the study.
These findings show the extent to which human actions on earth are changing. Last week, a separate team of scientists discovered that the Antarctic ice cap would continue to melt if the Paris Agreement’s goal of maintaining global temperatures did not exceed 2C and eventually raise sea levels by 2.5 meters above that level. Heating.
Although the Antarctic ice sheet will take centuries to melt like the Greenland ice sheet, this study found that the melting trend that was established in motion by human change in the weather was difficult, if not impossible, very difficult.
Arctic sea ice is also melting at a rapid pace. This summer’s sea ice minimum was the second lowest in the last 40 consecutive years. Unlike Greenland’s ice sheet, which sits on land, the Arctic ice cap floats and therefore its melting will not have much effect on sea level.
However, its melting absorbs more heat from the Earth’s albedo – a reflection of light back into space from ice – and under which the darker water is expelled, accelerating to become warmer.
A study that swallowed the centuries-old meltdown in Greenland last month also found these findings are likely to be the worst for centuries.
The team behind a recent study of Greenland has made their predictions over the past 12,000 years by building a computer model of a part of the southwestern region of the ice sheet and then moving on to the end of this century.
They tested their findings against what we could say, by satellite measurements and other instruments, and even by mapping the position of stones containing beryllium-10.
These are deposited with moving through glaciers, and measurements of beryllium-10 can reveal how long the stones have been in position, and so where was the edge of the ice sheet when the boulder was deposited.
“Before our study, science did not have much control over the long-term trends in Greenland’s ice loss rate,” Briner said.
Very careful work has been done to standardize today’s rates of massive ice damage on Greenland, but we don’t have a long-term view to put today’s rates in perspective. Our study provides that perspective. “
