Temperatures in parts of Greenland are warmer than they have been in 1,000 years, co-authors of a study that reconstructed the situation by drilling deep into the ice sheet told AFP on Friday.
“This confirms the bad news we already know, unfortunately … (It) is clear that we need to control this warming in order to stop the melting of the Greenland ice sheet”, climate physics professor Bo Mollesoe Vinther of the University of Copenhagen told AFP.
Rising seas
By drilling into the ice sheet to take samples of snow and ice from hundreds of years ago, scientists were able to reconstruct the temperature of northern and central Greenland from 1000 AD to 2011.
The results, published in the scientific journal Nature, show that the warming registered in the decade from 2001-2011 “exceeds some of the pre-industrial temperature variations of the past millennium with virtual certainty”.
During that decade, temperatures were “on average 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the 20th century”, the study found.
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The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet has caused sea levels to rise, threatening millions of people living on the coast who could find themselves underwater in the coming decades or centuries.
The Greenland ice sheet is now a major factor in the Earth’s oceans getting bigger, according to NASA, with the Arctic region warming faster than the rest of the planet.
Greenland ice sheet vs climate change
In a landmark 2021 report on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the Greenland ice sheet would contribute up to 18 centimeters of sea level rise by 2100 under the highest emissions scenario.
The massive ice sheet, two kilometers thick, contains enough frozen water to lift global seas by a total of more than seven meters (23 feet).
In the Paris climate agreement, countries have agreed to limit warming to less than 2C.
Also read: Extreme Greenland ice melt increases global flood risk – study
“The global warming signals we see around the world have also found their way to very remote locations in the Greenland ice sheet”, Vinther said.
“We have to stop this before we get to the point where we get a vicious cycle of independent melting of the Greenland ice sheet”, he warned.
“The sooner the better”.