Scientists have warned that Greenland will be ice-free in the next thousand years unless greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced. Using three different climate change scenarios, a team of researchers tested how the ice would respond in the future. Their findings showed that if we continue warming the earth, 100 percent of Greenland's present-day ice mass will be gone. This could raise sea levels by over seven meters (23 feet).
The Greenland Ice Sheet is a huge mass, almost the size of Alaska—but it has started to disintegrate. Ocean temperatures along its west coast rose by 1.5 ℃ between 1996 and 1998, causing the ice sheet to retreat and thin. Scientists are worried that warming could cause it to collapse—an event predicted to raise sea levels so much that it would submerge a number of major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans.
Scientists are working to understand how Greenland's ice sheet will respond to future warming. The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that if global greenhouse gas emissions continue, global temperatures will increase by between 2.6 ℃ and 4.8 ℃. If emissions are reduced drastically, this can be reduced to between 0.3 ℃ and 1.7 ℃. A third scenario is emissions peaking at the middle of the century than drop rapidly—if this happens warming of between 1.1 ℃ and 2.6 ℃.
Using these three climate change scenarios, researchers developed a model for how Greenland will respond to warming and ran 500 computer simulations to show what could happen over the next 1,000 years. The model took into account atmospheric and ocean conditions as well as ice geometry, flow and thickness.
Their findings, published in Science Advances, showed that “in a thousand years the Greenland Ice Sheet will look significantly different than today”. Under the best case scenario, Greenland will lose between 8 and 25 percent of its present-day mass. Under moderate climate change it would lose between 26 and 57 percent, while under the worst case scenario, between 72 and 100 percent will disappear.
本时文内容由奇速英语国际教育研究院原创编写，未经书面授权，禁止复制和任何商业用途，版权所有，侵权必究！（作者投稿及时文阅读定制请联系微信：400-1000-028）
13980503458
13980503458
admin@qisuen.cn
