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August 15, 2020 06:34 pm

Greenland's Ice Sheet has Melted to a Point of No Return

"Ice melting in Greenland contributes more than a millimeter rise to sea level every year," reports CNN, adding that now "that's likely to get worse." And Forbes shares some context:Last week, the world was given two more harsh reminders of what the future holds as residents of Italy's Aosta valley were told to evacuate fearing that a huge portion of the Mont Blanc glacier, the equivalent size of Milan's cathedral, might collapse. Then the last intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic, the Milne Ice Shelf, collapsed losing a chunk of ice bigger than Manhattan to the Arctic ocean. In April, a study published in The Cryosphere suggested that atmospheric circulation patterns contributed in a significant way to Greenland's rapid loss of ice and as such the future melting predictions could be underestimated by half. Now, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, Greenland's glaciers have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop right now, the ice sheet would continue shrinking. Satellite data from the last 40 years shows that Greenland's glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers.... Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss. The article notes that the paper was released "on the same day that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that July 2020 was the second-warmest July on record and that Arctic ice is currently at a record low for summer — the lowest in 42 years of record-keeping."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/FhLz0oxUZzA/greenlands-ice-sheet-has-melted-to-a-point-of-no-return

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