Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. Since the mid-20th century, carbon emissions have been growing at a steady rate. Climate change leads to feedback mechanisms, such as rising sea levels. The melting of the East Antarctic glacier is one of the causes of rising sea levels.
The disappearance of the world's ice sheets means that Earth's surface and oceans absorb more heat. According to a new NASA-supported study by an international team of Earth scientists and glaciologists, the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting at an accelerated rate. According to these findings, more ice will be lost from Greenland in the 21st century, which will contribute to sea-level rise.
The team was made up of researchers from the National Space Institute, the Glaciology Section at the Alfred Wegener Institute, and theInstitut des Gosciences de l'Environnement. Their paper was published in Nature.
The Isstrom glacier has been melting for the past 20 years. Since the collapse of the floating extensions in 2012 the glacier has retreated inland. The ice sheet is not regenerating enough due to the low levels of precipitation in the area. Scientists don't know how much ice is lost a year since the ice sheet's interior is hard to monitor.
The amount of ice lost appeared to have been underestimated. The situation is worse according to the study's lead author. He said that the previous projections of ice loss were vastly underestimated. A lot is happening at the front of the ice sheet, which is easily accessible, and that's what the models are focused on.
The data collected by the Global navigation Satellite System is the basis of the study. The EEM is dedicated to measuring polar sea ice thickness and monitoring changes in ice sheets. As Khan said.
“Our data show us that what we see happening at the front reaches far back into the heart of the ice sheet. We can see that the entire basin is thinning, and the surface speed is accelerating. Every year the glaciers we’ve studied have retreated further inland, and we predict that this will continue over the coming decades and centuries. Under present-day climate forcing, it is difficult to conceive how this retreat could stop.”
The study co-author is a professor at the college.
“It is truly amazing that we are able to detect a subtle speed change from high-precision GPS data, which ultimately, when combined with a model of ice flow, inform us on how the glacier slides on its bed. It is possible that what we find in northeast Greenland may be happening in other sectors of the ice sheet. Many glaciers have been accelerating and thinning near the margin in recent decades. GPS data helps us detect how far this acceleration propagates inland, potentially 200-300 km from the coast. If this is correct, the contribution from ice dynamics to the overall mass loss of Greenland will be larger than what current models suggest.”
According to their results, the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream will add between 13 and 15mm by the end of the century. The contribution of the ice sheet to the North Atlantic has been for 50 years. By the end of the century, global sea levels are expected to rise by 22 to 98 cm, according to the sixth assessment report.
Climate models will likely need to adjust the estimates upwards due to more precise observations of ice velocity. Eric Rignot is a professor at the UC Irvine.
“We foresee profound changes in global sea levels, more than currently projected by existing models. Data collected in the vast interior of ice sheets, such as those described herein, help us better represent the physical processes included in numerical models and in turn provide more realistic projections of global sea-level rise.”
There is further reading on nature.
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