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Earth Science

Greenland's Ice Melting Faster Than At Any Time In Past 12,000 Years (theguardian.com) 98

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Greenland's ice is starting to melt faster than at any time in the past 12,000 years, research has shown, which will raise sea levels and could have a marked impact on ocean currents. New measurements show the rate of melting matches any in the geological record for the Holocene period -- defined as the period since the last ice age -- and is likely to accelerate, according to a paper published in the journal Nature. The increased loss of ice is likely to lead to sea level rises of between 2cm and 10cm by the end of the century from Greenland alone, according to the study.

These changes, over the relatively short period of less than a century, appear to be unprecedented. Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years. The current melting will reverse that pattern and within the next 1,000 years, if global heating continues, the vast ice sheet is likely to vanish altogether. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise strongly, the rate of melting could accelerate further to be four times greater than anything found in the past 12,000 years.

The team behind the latest Greenland study made their estimates by producing a computer model of a section of the south-western region of the ice sheet over the past 12,000 years and then projecting forward to the end of this century. They checked their findings against what we can tell actually occurred with the ice, through satellite measurements and other instruments, and also by mapping the position of boulders containing beryllium-10. These are deposited by glaciers as they move, and measurements of beryllium-10 can reveal how long the boulders have been in position, and therefore where the edge of the ice sheet was when the boulder was deposited.

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Greenland's Ice Melting Faster Than At Any Time In Past 12,000 Years

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  • Greenland is not green. Oups! Yes it is!
      • At least, there is a lot of ice in Iceland...
        • Actually: nope ...

          • Actually rather yes: The Facts - by National Geographic [nationalgeographic.com]

            The milder climate means summers are intensely green throughout Iceland [only summer], even though 11 percent of that country is still covered with permanent ice cap. Vatnajökull is Europe’s largest glacier—a piece of ice the size of Puerto Rico.

            • Actually rather no, as you just proved with your link and your copy paste summery.

              Do you have problems with numbers?

              • It says that 11% is *permanently* covered with ice, and is green (only) *in summer* (meaning, 75% of the year it's not).

                Do you have problems with understanding?
                • No, you have problems in understanding: only 11% are covered permanently in ice.
                  So: it is definitely not majouribyle: ice/snow. Oops.

                  Oh: and Germany also only "green in summer", oops.

    • ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/2278/ [xkcd.com]

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Greenland was named by a Viking real estate developer. Just like Vinland, but Greenland was closer.

  • by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @10:55PM (#60559380) Homepage Journal

    Need to capture that fresh water. There are a ton of places it can be sold!

    • Need to capture that fresh water. There are a ton of places it can be sold!

      I live in drought-plagued California. Water here costs $1 per HCF or about 30 cents per ton.

      Good luck shipping a product thousands of miles, pumping it a thousand feet uphill, and still making a profit at 30 cents per ton.

      • Need to capture that fresh water. There are a ton of places it can be sold!

        I live in drought-plagued California. Water here costs $1 per HCF or about 30 cents per ton.

        Good luck shipping a product thousands of miles, pumping it a thousand feet uphill, and still making a profit at 30 cents per ton.

        I live in California. Believe me, I don't like to admit this, but people here just might buy Greenland water in bottles, because marketing.

        But no, that would not be an opportunity. That would be deck-chair designers pitching new flotation-friendly concepts to the Titanic decorators as the ship was sinking.

      • What we really need right now is water to fall out of the sky over the whole state over a few days and put out all this toxic-air-creating fire.
        • What we really need right now is water to fall out of the sky over the whole state over a few days and put out all this toxic-air-creating fire.

          And let the mudslides begin.

          • Mudslides don't pollute the air across the entirety of the Westernmost states, their damage is localized. If you don't live here then you don't understand how bad it's been, and if you don't have breathing problems to begin with then you'll never understand what it's been like.
        • Maybe nuking Greenland will create rain. Of course give the population time to evacuate.

      • Good luck shipping a product thousands of miles...

        That's the beauty of it. You can dump it in an ocean on the other side of the planet and pick it back up anywhere else in the world on a coastline, because it's water.

        • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          So long as you're willing to remove all the substances that are dissolved into it, such as salt...

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Historically, we used to do just that. Before refrigeration became a thing, but after shipping of frozen food and flash freezing of food was invented, there used to be massive ships transporting huge blocks of ice across oceans to be used in food industry.

    • Greenland ice sheet is 1 million years old, each layer of that sheet is full of ancient secrets (if hopefully that doesn't melt from the bottom).
      • "Greenland ice sheet is 1 million years old, each layer of that sheet is full of ancient secrets"

        Better send Daniel Jackson there then...

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Unfortunately, a lot of the melt *is* from the bottom. Less than half, but a lot. The melt water from the top leaks down to the base to lubricate the flow of the ice, and when it does so it causes the lowest levels of ice to also melt.

  • Data (Score:3, Informative)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @11:26PM (#60559480) Journal
    The paper describes a computer model, built on the reconstruction in this paper [wiley.com], and a couple others (rtfa if you want to find them). The weakness of the computer model here is the same as all these Greenland models, in that we don't have a good historical reconstruction of what the ice and snow in Greenland was like for the past millennia.

    This is before even looking at the quality of their computer model.
  • At least we were warned.
  • and even stop nat gas.

    We need to move to all sorts of AE (wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, etc), as well as nukes.
    We need to stop nations like Germany, China, India, Japan, S. Korea, etc from building new coal plants while getting nearly ALL NATIONS to drop their emissions. It does not matter how high they are. It matter that nearly all nations emit way too much and a number of them continue to increase yearly, as opposed to dropping. [europa.eu]

    Even if you look at per capita data, we need to get all nations bel [europa.eu]
    • Lets keep people out of those nations and have them stay in their own nations which produce a smaller carbon per cap. In fact, immigrants in those nations should return to their source nations which had a lower carbon per cap. This is one way to reduce emissions. WHAT? That's not an acceptable thing, even though its in the right direction?? And here I thought you were willing to do any thing it takes.
    • We need to stop nations like Germany, China, India, Japan, S. Korea, etc

      All those countries are cleaner than the US [ourworldindata.org]

    • Yes. And we need to Cap the volcanoes that are spewing CO2 like made. And also the ocean sea floor vents that allow C02 to escape.
  • by cygnusvis ( 6168614 ) on Thursday October 01, 2020 @01:23AM (#60559634)
    Further back than 12k years it was melting faster? Is it because of the other industrial revolution that happened 13k years ago?
    • It's because your mom's mom took a vacation there.

    • Humans are not the only ones that can quickly affect climate. Some say a comet came to visit us 13k years ago https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Too bad there isn't a stupid mod. Your statement is true, but nearly irrelevant. That are multiple reasons that climate changes, and humans are only one of them. (The first human driven global warming was probably rice paddies, though that was minor, but it significantly raised the methane levels.)

      Various modifiers of climate include volcanoes, meteors, comets?, continental drift, etc. The speed, however, is not constant across these. Volcanoes have faster effects than human driven changes, and meteors

    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      Further back than 12k years it was melting faster? Is it because of the other industrial revolution that happened 13k years ago?

      Might have been the end of an ice age, maybe. (That's due to orbital wobbles, by the way). The current state of orbital wobbles should have us getting cooler at the moment, as was the case for the last 8000 years.

  • Really. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Archtech ( 159117 )

    "An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian".

    Not an encouraging start.

  • Fake news, fake glaciers, fake water, don't listen to the sciencey nonsense, trust the high quality info on Facebook for the real truth. MAGA, vote Trump. ~

  • Is it melting faster than when the last article I read said it was melting faster? A couple more news posts about this and I'm afraid the ice will literally be boiling off water!
    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      Probably not. It's just a little (12,000 year) added context to that rate.

  • by Volatile_Memory ( 140227 ) on Thursday October 01, 2020 @07:19AM (#60560186)

    "Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years"

    Well, then, we just need to take whatever drastic steps our ancestors took 4,000 - 7,000 years ago to get the ice re-accumulating. Problem solved. You are welcome.

    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      "Greenland's ice sheet shrank between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, and has been slowly cumulating over the past 4,000 years"

      7000-4000 years ago it was static. It had been increasing 4000 years ago to present.

      Well, then, we just need to take whatever drastic steps our ancestors took 4,000 - 7,000 years ago to get the ice re-accumulating. Problem solved. You are welcome.

      It's due to orbital effects.

  • by t4eXanadu ( 143668 ) on Thursday October 01, 2020 @08:51AM (#60560478)

    This is due to poor glacier management. If Greenland had managed their glaciers better, this wouldn't be a problem!

    • This is due to poor glacier management. If Greenland had managed their glaciers better, this wouldn't be a problem!

      If only they'd rake them like Finland does to their forests. All this could be avoided.

  • Geologically speaking. The current ice age, not interglacial period, that we are still exiting from, is 3 million years old.

  • They will talk about how much ice is "growing" in the Greenland area, and then how fast it is melting in Antarctica. Duh! The tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun causes ice to melt in the northern hemisphere from around May to October and melt in the southern hemisphere from around October to May. "worst in 120,000 years" More climate change BS!
    • Oh bull. Ice THICKNESS is vanishing in Greenland at the fastest rate in 12000 years and is NOT growing [nasa.gov]
    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      They will talk about how much ice is "growing" in the Greenland area, and then how fast it is melting in Antarctica. Duh! The tilt of the Earth in relation to the sun causes ice to melt in the northern hemisphere from around May to October and melt in the southern hemisphere from around October to May. "worst in 120,000 years" More climate change BS!

      Please get some science education.

  • It means a period when you have lots of thick ice and we currently still do have a lot of ice, even though it's melting fast. When ocean levels rise is when you're not in an Ice Age, because that's the ice having melted and is now mostly gone. The polar ice probably goes last so generally it's when there is no polar ice on the planet. We are in the Quaternary geological period which is a cycle of warming and cooling called interglacial and glacial periods. The Holocene is simply the name of this current int
  • Does this take into account the switch to paper Straws?
  • Melting is what normally happens in an interglacial period. Not coincidentally, the last glacial period ended around 12,000 years ago.

    Go figure.

    • by green1 ( 322787 )

      Our local glacier has a sign about climate change lamenting that the glacier is shrinking and that this could mean one day there will be no water downstream of it for people to drink. What they don't mention is that if it weren't shrinking, there ALSO would be no water downstream of it, as that is the source of the river!

      • Wrong. It could remain static, taking in new ice as fast as existing ice melts..You know, like every day for the last 12000 in Greenland
        • by green1 ( 322787 )

          If that were the case, then the river would still flow with no glacier at all, as the amount of accumulation would be the same with or without it. What they are pointing out is that without the glacier actively shrinking, there wouldn't be as much water downstream, but then getting upset that it's actively shrinking. You can't have it both ways!

          • If that were the case, then the river would still flow with no glacier at all, as the amount of accumulation would be the same with or without it. What they are pointing out is that without the glacier actively shrinking, there wouldn't be as much water downstream, but then getting upset that it's actively shrinking. You can't have it both ways!

            Seriously stupid as can be demonstrated from ice cores going back a century [realclimate.org]

    • Just wait until the day we pass peak-warming in this current interglacial period.

      When the dive into the next ice age begins and people realize that the planet is getting inexorably cooler decade-by decade, and that humans cannot stop it no matter how much they burn, and they then consider the problem of feeding billions of people on a world largely covered in ice where most current farmland is going to be under a mile of the stuff and blocked from sunlight...

      and maybe THAT is the point when people will reme

      • There isn't going to be a next Ice Age until we're gone
      • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

        Just wait until the day we pass peak-warming in this current interglacial period.

        When the dive into the next ice age begins and people realize that the planet is getting inexorably cooler decade-by decade, and that humans cannot stop it no matter how much they burn

        This is the period we have been in for the last 4000 years. Human activity has reversed it entirely.

    • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

      Melting is what normally happens in an interglacial period. Not coincidentally, the last glacial period ended around 12,000 years ago.

      Go figure.

      The warming period of this interglacial period ended 8000 years ago. Ice increased in Greenland over the last 4000 years because of this. It is tied to orbital effects. The last 200 years has reversed this trend despite the orbital effects indicating we should be getting continued cooling.

      • Some "scientists" find the MWO and LIA highly inconvenient and try to downplay or erase them. Good on you for at least knowing they exist.

        • by q_e_t ( 5104099 )

          Some "scientists" find the MWO and LIA highly inconvenient and try to downplay or erase them. Good on you for at least knowing they exist.

          I know some climate scientists and they aren't biased like you seem to imagine. In fact they would much rather find that climate change wasn't happening, although in some ways if it turned out it was not caused by humans that's more worrying as it would mean we have no control over it.

  • No point in talking about the bullshit denialist rants, they're all the same

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

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