Greenland’s Frozen Hinterlands are Bleeding Worse Than We Thought
upstart writes:
Estimates of global sea level rise from large ice flows might be much too low:
Sea level rise may proceed faster than expected in the coming decades, as a gargantuan flow of ice slithering out of Greenland's remote interior both picks up speed and shrinks.
By the end of the century, the ice stream's deterioration could contribute to nearly 16 millimeters of global sea level rise - more than six times the amount scientists had previously estimated, researchers report November 9 in Nature.
The finding suggests that inland portions of large ice flows elsewhere could also be withering and accelerating due to human-caused climate change, and that past research has probably underestimated the rates at which the ice will contribute to sea level rise.
"It's not something that we expected," says Shfaqat Abbas Khan, a glaciologist at the Technical University of Denmark in Kongens Lyngby. "Greenland and Antarctica's contributions to sea level rise in the next 80 years will be significantly larger than we have predicted until now."
[...] "We've mostly concerned ourselves with the margins," says atmosphere-cryosphere scientist Jenny Turton of the nonprofit Arctic Frontiers in Tromso, Norway, who was not involved in the new study. That's where the most dramatic changes with the greatest impacts on sea level rise have been observed, she says .
[...] The findings suggest that past research has probably underestimated rates of sea level rise due to the ice stream, Stearns and Turton say. Similarly, upstream thinning and acceleration in other large ice flows, such as those associated with Antarctica's shrinking Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, might also cause sea levels to rise faster than expected, Turton says.
Journal Reference:
Khan, S.A., Choi, Y., Morlighem, M. et al. Extensive inland thinning and speed-up of Northeast Greenland Ice Stream. Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05301-z
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