Sepp Kipfstuhl
Melting ice front at Russel Glacier, Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, late July 2022.
Nationalgeographic.co.id—The latest scientific reports that have been published in journals Nature reveal that global warming today it has reached central Greenland. From the results ice core reconstruction indicates, that this time is the warmest decade in the last thousand years.
The region is now 1.5 °C warmer than it was during the 20th century. The research was led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research.
Using a long set of ice cores of unprecedented quality, they reconstructed past temperatures at central Greenland-north and rate of melting of the permafrost.
Lapisan Is Greenland plays an important role in the global climate system. With large amounts of water stored in the ice (about 3 million cubic kilometers), the melting and resulting sea level rise is considered a potential tipping point.
For undiminished global emission levels, ice sheets are projected to contribute up to 50 centimeters to global average sea level by 2100.
Weather stations along the coast have been recording rising temperatures for years. However, the effect of global warming at altitudes up to 3,000 m from the ice sheet remains unclear due to a lack of long-term observations.
This research has presented clear evidence that the effects of global warming are already reaching the remote highland areas of north-central Greenland.
Sepp Kipfstuhl
River of meltwater at the ice margin at Point 660 (near Russel Glacier), Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, late August 2022
“The time series that we recovered from the ice cores now continuously cover more than 1,000 years, from 1000 to 2011,” said AWI glaciologist Maria Hörhold, lead author of the study.
“These data show that warming in 2001 to 2011 was markedly different from the natural variation over the last 1,000 years of global warming, we were surprised by how marked this difference was.”
Together with colleagues from AWI and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, he analyzed the isotope composition in a shallow ice core that congregated in north-central Greenland during a special AWI expedition.
Previous ice cores obtained at the same location starting in the 1990s, show no obvious warming in north-central Greenland, despite increasing global average temperatures. Part of the reason is the substantial natural climate variability in the region.
PROMOTED CONTENT
Featured Videos
