Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? It flowed rapidly into the ocean,” he said. An ice sheet, also known as a continental glacier, is a mass of glacial ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than 50,000 km (19,000 sq mi). This means that melting of ice has now taken over as the main contributor of sea level rise. Are you sure you want to delete this comment? Sea levels will rise by a further 17cm and put 16 million people at risk of yearly coastal flooding if global warming continues apace, British and Danish researchers warned. “What these results suggest, or show, is that when people talk about a 2C warmer world as a good thing, actually what it shows is we don’t want to get close to 2C,” he said. Create a commenting name to join the debate, There are no Independent Premium comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts, There are no comments yet - be the first to add your thoughts. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at a rate which matches climate scientists’ worst-case scenario forecasts and has raised the global sea level by 1.8cm in the past two decades. The study’s lead author Chris Turney is a climate change and earth scientist at UNSW. They used some shallow drilling to take ice samples from the surface. A research team, led by scientists at the University of New South Wales, examined the cause of high sea levels during a period known as the last interglacial, which occurred 129,000-116,000 years ago. He said the team’s research could be used to focus on which sections of West Antarctica are most vulnerable to the current climate crisis. It melted. “Although we anticipated the ice sheets would lose increasing amounts of ice in response to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere, the rate at which they are melting has accelerated faster than we could have imagined,” said the study’s lead author, Tom Slater, a climate researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds. Independent Premium Comments can be posted by members of our membership scheme, Independent Premium. Through isotope measurements, they found a gap in the ice sheet record immediately prior to the last interglacial. Cause of rise was ocean warming of less than 2C, which has major implications for future, researchers warn, Last modified on Wed 12 Feb 2020 20.16 EST. Please continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates. Sea level rise is a natural consequence of the warming of our planet. Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate? The paper says ocean temperatures during the last interglacial were likely up to 2C warmer than they are today and global sea levels were 6-9 metres higher. A lot of Antarctic research involves deep ice core drilling to study years of climate history. Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. ), Anna Hogg, study co-author and climate researcher at Leeds university’s School of Earth and Environment at Leeds, said: “If ice sheet losses continue to track our worst-case climate warming scenarios we should expect an additional 17cm of sea level rise from the ice sheets alone. “It means that a large part of the west Antarctic almost certainly disappeared in the last interglacial. Millions worldwide at growing risk of flooding, researchers warn, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. The authors warn the sheets are losing ice at the worst-case rate forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at a rate which matches climate scientists’ worst-case scenario forecasts and has raised the global sea level by 1.8cm in the past two decades. The most insightful comments on all subjects will be published daily in dedicated articles. Turney said this gap coincided with an extreme rise in sea level and suggested a period in which there was no ice accumulating in that valley. “So the question is how much could fall into the ocean and this is where the last interglacial [period] is so important.”. If emissions continue to rise, the current rate of melting on the Greenland ice sheet is expected to double by the end of the century. Rising temperatures could push meltwater into fractures in the shelves’ surface, making them vulnerable to collapse, warned scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Mass melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, driven by warmer ocean temperatures, was a major cause of extreme sea level rise more than 100,000 … How much and how quickly these Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt in the future will largely determine how much ocean levels rise in the future. Countries have signed on to the Paris agreement which aims to keep global heating below 2C. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. Greenland lost billions of tonnes of ice to global warming last year, Ice sheets melting at ‘worst-case scenario’ rate, Greenland lost 1 million tonnes of ice for each minute of 2019, The looming climate disaster that no one is talking about, Scientists warn of rapid melting of Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday glacier’, You may not agree with our views, or other users’, but please respond to them respectfully, Swearing, personal abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia and other discriminatory or inciteful language is not acceptable, Do not impersonate other users or reveal private information about third parties, We reserve the right to delete inappropriate posts and ban offending users without notification. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment. A separate study published last week by US researchers warned global warming threatened to rapidly destroy Antarctic ice shelves with “huge implications for sea level”. The only current ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland; during the last glacial period at Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of North America, the Weichselian ice sheet covered northern Europe and the Patagonian Ice Sheet covered southern South America. “The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise,” he added. “This has been a big concern and is what the concern is in the present day,” Turney said. When these winds blow over mountains, they remove snow and ice, allowing ancient ice to come to the surface. Please be respectful when making a comment and adhere to our Community Guidelines. To trace Antarctica’s potential contribution to this sea-level rise, the scientists travelled to West Antarctica to the Patriot Hills Blue Ice Area, which is on the periphery of the West Antarctic ice sheet. A researcher holds ancient air trapped as gas bubbles within ice. The existing Open Comments threads will continue to exist for those who do not subscribe to Independent Premium. That’s enough to double the frequency of storm-surge flooding in many of the world’s largest coastal cities.”. Blue ice areas are created by katabatic winds. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, compares the latest results from satellite surveys of ice sheet mass with calculations from climate models. Their study finds that melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet caused a sea-level rise of more than three metres and it took less than 2C of ocean warming for that to occur. Mass melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, driven by warmer ocean temperatures, was a major cause of extreme sea level rise more than 100,000 years ago, according to new research.
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