Global warming: the melting of the Greenland ice cap has reached a point of no return

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is inevitable and efforts to slow global warming will not prevent it from disappearing altogether, highlights a new study published in “Nature Communications Earth and Environment”.

In this study, scientists observed the evolution of more than 200 glaciers in Greenland over the past 40 years, thanks to the study of satellite data.

“We would still lose mass quite quickly”

“The ice sheet is now in a new dynamic state such that even if we returned to a climate that looked more like the one we had 20 or 30 years ago, we would still lose mass quite quickly”, explains Ian Howat. , study co-author and professor at Ohio State University.

This is because the snowfall that periodically fills the same ice cap and strengthens glaciers just doesn’t keep pace with what is melting.

The ice that melts and drains into the ocean is much more than the amount of snow that periodically accumulates on the surface of the same canopy.

Researchers found that, at least until the 1990s, this balance between melting ice and accumulating snow was “respected”.

But since the 2000s, the balance has been broken as SciencePost explains. The snow that is supposed to replenish the ice cap each year no longer makes up for the loss of ice that has flowed into the ocean.

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