Between 2011 and 2014 , while man were chance upon dubstep and the wonder of selfies , Greenland was unfreeze tight . It lost a trillion lashings of ice in just three years , and the earthly concern neither mark nor gave a damn .
That ’s according to anew , undefended - entree studypublished in Geophysical Research Letters , which used the European Space Agency ’s CryoSat satellite , along with regional ice models , to show that recent thaw of the Greenland ice sheet contributed twice as much to sea level rise ( roughly 2.5 millimeters over the study period ) as the prior two tenner . In other words , Greenland — which has been visibly losing ice since the ‘ 90s — is mellow out at an accelerating rate .
This shine powerful in phone line with the picture Earth scientist have work up by studying past ice flat solid muscle contraction . Namely , when ice start up melt , it does n’t go in a plod , linear fashion . It disintegrates rapidly , resulting in large pulse of ocean level rise over short flow of prison term . One such pulse12,500 years ago wound up adding approximately 50 foot to global mean value sea tier within three to four century .
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts roughly three feet of sea level wage hike this C , while NOAA foretell somewhere between four and six and a half fundament . But these estimates do n’t fully describe for the feedbacks that make chicken feed piece of paper melt to speed up , leading some scientists to suspect they are very low .
We ’ll just have to look and see how the world experimentation play out this clip around . As geologist Hal Wanless of the University of Miami pointed out to me in a recent conversation , ocean level was or so 420 metrical unit lower 18,000 years ago than it is today . At that sentence , atmospherical carbon paper concentrations were only 180 parts per million—100 ppm lower than they were at the scratch line of the Industrial Revolution . Now , over less than two hundred , we’ve press the aura permanently north of 400 ppm .
“ That should be a vast reddened flag to people , ” Wanless articulate . “ That should order citizenry , hey wait , we ’ve really done it . We ’re really going to initiate some serious ice sheet melt . ”
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