CNN
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people fiddle with the planet’s thermostatunites scientists History of Greenland to analyze how ice cores are drilled affected by the climate crisis island nation over the years. The deeper they dug, the further back in time they went, allowing them to distinguish which temperature fluctuations were natural and which were human-caused.
After research on the Greenland ice sheet – which CNN visited while the colors were digging – scientists said on Wednesday Nature magazine that temperatures there have been the warmest in at least 1,000 years—the longest period for which their ice cores can be analyzed. And they found that between 2001 and 2011, it was an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in the 20th century.
The authors of the report said that human-caused climate change has played an important role in the sharp rise in temperature in the critical Arctic region, where ice melt has global impacts.
“Greenland is currently the biggest contributor to sea level rise,” study lead author Maria Hörhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, told CNN. “And if we continue to emit carbon as we do now, then by 2100 Greenland will contribute up to 50 centimeters of sea level rise, affecting millions of people living in coastal areas.”
Greenland: Mysteries in the Ice — Part 5
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– Source: CNN
Weather stations at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet have detected that its coastal regions are warming, but due to a lack of long-term observations, scientists have limited understanding of the effects of rising temperatures there.
According to Hörhold, understanding the past is important to prepare for future outcomes.
“If you want to say something is global warming, you have to know what natural variability is before people actually interact with the atmosphere,” he said. “For that, you have to go back to the past – the pre-industrial era – when people didn’t emit. [carbon dioxide] enters the atmosphere”.
In pre-industrial times, there were no weather stations in Greenland that collected temperature data like they do today. So scientists have relied on paleoclimate data, such as ice cores, to study the region’s warming patterns. Hörhold said that the last robust ice core analysis in Greenland was completed in 1995, and the data did not detect warming even though climate change is already evident elsewhere.
“Extending to 2011, we can show that there is, in fact, warming,” he said. “The warming trend has been there since 1800, but we had strong natural variability that masked that warming.”
Before people start beching fossil fuel emissions Atmospheric temperatures near 32 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland were unheard of. However, recent studies show that the Arctic region has been it heats up four times faster more than the rest of the planet.
Significant warming in the Greenland ice sheet is approaching tipping point, scientists say. catastrophic meltdown. Greenland has enough ice that if it all melted, it could raise global sea levels about 24 feetAccording to NASA.
Although the study only covered temperatures up to 2011, Greenland has experienced extreme events since then. In 2019, an unexpectedly hot spring and a July heat wave caused almost the entire surface of the ice sheet to start melting and shed approx 532 billion tons of ice to the sea The scientists then reported that the global sea level would rise by 1.5 millimeters as a result.
Then in 2021, it rained at the top of Greenland—about two miles above sea level. first time in the note. Later, warm weather intensified the extreme rain event and caused the waste 7 billion tons of water in the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington, DC, about 250,000 times.
As these extreme events become more frequent in Greenland, Hörhold said the team will continue to monitor changes.
“Every degree counts,” Hörhold said. “At some point, we’re going to go back to Greenland and continue to extend those records.”
