‘Greenland ice cap lost enough water in last 20 yrs to cover US’
COPENHAGEN/PARIS: Greenland’s immense ice sheet has lost enough ice in the past 20 years to submerge the entire US in half a metre of water, according to data released this week by Danish researchers.
The climate is warming faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet and melting ice from Greenland is now the main factor in the rise in the Earth’s oceans, according to Nasa.
Since measurements began in 2002, the Greenland ice sheet has lost about 4,700 billion tonnes of ice, said Polar Portal, a joint project involving several Danish Arctic research institutes.
This represents 4,700 cubic kilometres of melted water “enough to cover the entire US by half a metre” - and has contributed 1.2cm to sea level rise, the Arctic monitoring website added.
Polar Portal’s findings are based on satellite imagery from the US-German Grace programme (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), which showed the ice melt to be most severe near the coasts of the Arctic territory, at the edge of the ice sheet.
In these peripheral zones, “independent observations also indicate that the ice is thinning, that the glacier fronts are retreating in fjords and on land, and that there is a greater degree of melting from the surface of the ice”, the website said.
The west coast of Greenland is particularly affected, according to the data. Climate change is particularly alarming in the Arctic, which scientists say is warming at a rate three to four times the global average.
According to a study published by Nasa in late January, the accelerated melting near Greenland’s coasts can be explained by the warming of the Arctic Ocean.
Study says plants in UK flowering ‘a month early’
Global warming is causing plants in the UK to burst into flower around a month earlier, with potentially profound consequences for crops and wildlife, according to research on Wednesday that used nature observations going back to the 1700s.
Trees, herbs and other flowering plants have shifted seasonal rhythms as temperatures have increased, according to the study led by the University of Cambridge.
The results are “truly alarming” because of the ecological threats posed by early flowering, said Ulf Buntgen, a professor from Cambridge’s department of geography, who led the research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Crops can be killed off if they blossom early and are then lashed by a late frost, but researchers said the bigger threat was to wildlife.