One study A recent study revealed that floating ice shelves in northern Greenland have lost approximately a third of their volume over the past four decades.
This decline raises an alarm for a possible “dramatic” rise in sea levels, posing a significant threat.
These platforms play a crucial role in regulating the flow of ice from the region’s glaciers to the ocean. In turn, they contain enough ice to raise sea levels by 2.1 meters.
Since 1978, these platforms have experienced an alarming loss, exceeding 35% of their total volume, which resulted in the complete collapse of three of them, as the study points out.
Understand the problem
O global warmingdriven by the use of fossil fuels, makes these ice shelves “extremely vulnerable” to even more significant retreat and, potentially, future collapse.
This information comes from a study published in Nature Communications.
Image: Reproduction
The authors warn of the possible dramatic consequences of this phenomenon, specifically in relation to rising sea levels.
Although the melting of ice shelves themselves does not contribute to this increase, since they are already in the water, their function as “dams” in regulating ice discharge into the ocean is crucial.
If these natural barriers disintegrate, the glaciers they could dump more ice into the oceans, exacerbating the impacts of melting.
Contrary to the long-held view of glacier stability in the region, scientists discovered that they began to discharge ice in response to the weakening of the shelves.
This weakening, in turn, is attributed to melting at the bottom of ice shelves, a result of warming oceans.
The study’s lead author, Romain Millan, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, in French), highlights a significant increase in melting since the 2000s, directly correlating with rising ocean temperatures in the region.
The researchers, based in Denmark, France and the United States, used a comprehensive approach, combining thousands of satellite images, field measurements and climate models to reconstruct the nature of these floating glacier tracts.
The recent destabilization of glaciers in Greenland over the past 20 years indicates that ice loss has outpaced gains.
The Greenland ice sheet, which accounts for approximately 17% of global warming sea level observed between 2006 and 2018, highlights the urgency of addressing the causes of the melt and its global implications.
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