2023-10-22 06:46:43
The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet might add more than a meter to sea level rise if limits set by climate targets are not met, according to a new study. However, it is possible to prevent its collapse.
This requires that warming be reversed and brought back to a safer level, indicates the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature by an international consortium of researchers.
Glaciers and polar ice caps are melting as a result of global warming caused by human activity, with the Arctic warming faster than the global average. The melting of the Greenland ice sheet – the second largest in the world following Antarctica – is estimated to have contributed more than 20% to the sea level rise observed since 2002.
Using simulations, the study suggests that significant losses of ice sheets are expected if global average temperatures increased by 1.7 to 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
No more than 1.5 degrees
Such a scenario would risk causing a “point of no return” that would cause the Greenland ice sheet to melt almost completely over hundreds or thousands of years and might raise ocean levels by seven meters, thereby redrawing the map of the world.
Staying below 1.5 degrees might nonetheless mitigate ice loss and sea level rise, depending on the magnitude and duration of the current global temperature rise.
“We found that the ice sheet responds so slowly to human-caused warming that reversing the current trend by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in coming centuries might prevent it from tipping over,” he said. said Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Research Institute for the Effects of Climate Change, co-author of the study.
“Yet a temporary exceedance of temperature thresholds can still lead to a peak sea level rise of more than a meter in our simulations,” he added.
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