Scientist who revealed world’s ice was melting killed by climate change

He falls into hole caused by global warming

THE expert who alerted the world to Greenland’s shrinking ice sheet has died after plunging into a crevasse created by rising temperatures in the Arctic. melt?” He had been up for hours, making back-of-the envelope calculations.

He realised the melting ice was becoming a threat which world leaders should wake up to, and former US Vice President Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, were among the politicians who visited the camp in Greenland.

In 1997, Dr Steffen flew over the Jakobshavn Glacier and saw that its tongue had collapsed, as though “somebody had hit it with a massive hammer”. Seismographs began to pick up an increasing number of ice quakes, suggesting the ice sheet was juddering towards the sea.

The temperature was rising so steeply that at first Dr Steffen did not believe his own monitors. After 20 years, they indicated a rise of 4C. Zurich-born Dr Steffen believed the scientific community’s predictions of sea level rise were too optimistic. In 2007, after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted sea levels would rise by 18cm to 59cm by 2100, he said: “Unfortunately, I think we are looking more like a metre.”

He told a journalist: “There will be a change coming, and obviously a change that we have not seen in thousands of years.”

Because of the decline of sun-reflecting sea ice, the Arctic is thought to be warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

The Mirror last year reported from Greenland, highlighting how the impact of the climate crisis meant that in one generation locals had stopped being able to drive sledges, or hunt animals, such as seals and walrus, which would once have got trapped in the ice.

Another change was the appearance on the ice sheet of the kind of crevasses which claimed Konrad Steffen’s life on August 8.

He is survived by his second wife, Bianca Perren, a paleoecologist, and two children.