The heat wave that smashed records in Europe last week has now reached Greenland, where it is causing the world’s second-largest ice sheet to endure one of its most exteme melting events ever documented, leading experts to express fresh concerns about what the global climate crisis will mean for future sea level rise.
Josh Willis, a NASA scientist who researches Greenland’s melting glaciers, told Mashable on Thursday that “it’s no surprise that Greenland keeps setting records for melt and high temperatures.”
“The entire planet is getting warmer, but the Arctic is warming faster than every place else,” said Willis. “We are watching these huge ice sheets shrink every year now, and there is no sign of that stopping any time soon.”
Sharing updates on Greeland’s temperature and ice melt records from this week that Xavier Fettweis—a polar scientist at the University of Liège in Belgium—posted to Twitter Thursday, meteorologist and science writer Eric Holthaus declared in a tweet, “We are in a climate emergency.”
Holthaus also shared his latest piece for Rolling Stone, published ahead of the heat wave’s peak on Thursday.
In the Rolling Stone article, Fettweis told Holthaus that “this melt event is a good alarm signal that we urgently need [to] change our way of living,” and suggests that projections from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “are too optimistic in the Arctic.”
Fettweis, in an interview with InsideClimate News, explained that “the current melt rate is equivalent to what the model projects for 2070, using the most pessimistic model,” According to NASA, the global sea level will rise 17 to 23 feet if Greenland’s ice sheet melts entirely.
Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the the Danish Meteorological Institute, drew a similar conclusion.
“By mid-to-end of the century is when we should be seeing these melt levels—not right now,” she told InsideClimate News. “[The models] are clearly not able to capture some of these important processes.”
“Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees [Celsius] there’s a tipping point after which it will no longer be possible to maintain the Greenland Ice Sheet,” Mottram added. “What we don’t have a handle on is how quickly the Greenland Ice Sheet will be lost.”
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