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.”
That uncertainty has caused some observers, such as Holthaus, to express hope that humanity will act to address planet-warming emissions with the goal of preventing climate catastrophe. He wrote Wednesday for Rolling Stone:
As daunting as this is, the latest science on Greenland also points to a window of hope: Greenland’s meltdown is not yet irreversible. That self-sustaining process of melt-begetting-more-melt would kick in at around 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of global warming. That means whether or not Greenland’s ice sheet melts completely is almost entirely in human control: A full-scale mobilization—including rapidly transforming the basis of the global economy toward a future where fossil fuels are no longer used—would probably be enough to keep most of the remaining ice frozen, where it belongs.
But it’s not just future sea level rise that has experts alarmed—it’s also what is happening currently.
“The fate of Greenland’s ice sheet is of critical importance to every coastal resident in the world, since Greenland is already the biggest contributor to modern-day sea level rise,” The Washington Post reported Wednesday.