«Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?»
The island of Greenland, population 56,000, is almost entirely covered in ice that is more than a mile thick in some areas. That’s roughly 8 percent of all ice on Earth.
And since 1998, it’s been melting due to climate change, adding about 0.027 inches a year to global sea levels. If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would raise global sea levels by 20 feet. That’s enough to inundate much of lower Manhattan in New York City and flood the National Mall in Washington, DC.
So figuring out how much and how fast this ice is thawing is crucial to the fate of the planet as we know it. And new research looking at these questions is pretty ominous.
In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers using satellite and ground measurements found ice loss increased fourfold between 2003 and 2012. The faster melting mainly occurred in the southwestern part of the ice sheet, a region that previously wasn’t thought to be thawing so rapidly.
By 2013, however, the rate of melt appeared to pause, which the researchers linked to a cyclical weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. In its negative phase, warm air, more sunlight, and less snow reach Western Greenland. The cycle swung into its positive phase in 2013.
Lead author Michael Bevis, a professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, told the New York Times that the pause is cold comfort as global average temperatures continue to rise:
And as he noted in a press release, “We’re going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future. Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?”
Several studies lately have illustrated a disturbing fact about climate change: While the overall warming trend is slow and gradual, its effects can be sharp and sudden.
