Greenland’s ice sheet melt has ‘gone into overdrive’ and is now ‘off the charts’
The melting of Greenland’s massive ice sheet has now accelerated, scientists announced Wednesday, and shows no signs of slowing down, according to a new study.
“Melting of the Greenland ice sheet has gone into overdrive,” said Luke Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University and lead author of the study. “Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years,” he said.
Ice loss from Greenland is the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise, which is predicted to lead to inundation of low-lying islands and coastal cities around the world over the next several decades and centuries.
Conservative estimates of global sea level rise are currently an additional half a meter or more by 2100 , according to German news agency Deutsche Welle (DW). Alun Hubbard, a professor of glaciology at Aberystwyth University in Wales, told DW that even an increase of half a meter is “a terrible disaster for humanity – especially coastal regions of the planet.”
“From a historical perspective, today’s melt rates are off the charts, and this study provides the evidence to prove this” said co-author Sarah Das, a glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. [Continue reading…]