Greenland’s massive ice sheet is melting at an accelerated rate, signalling a turning point for the planet. Spending 23 days surrounded by ice, snow and glaciers, Steven Ko documents the perils of climate change
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is covered by a massive ice sheet—a mass of glacial ice blanketing an area of about 1.71 million square kilometres (660,000 square miles) or nearly 80 per cent of the country’s land surface.
Scientists have been sounding the alarm about the state of Greenland’s ice cover: it’s melting at an accelerated rate, a phenomenon that, if left unchecked, will lead to catastrophe. If the Greenland ice sheet (GIS) were to melt completely, the global sea level would rise by seven metres (around 23 feet), putting New York, Miami, Shanghai, the Philippines, and other low-lying areas at risk. The event will also alter the Earth’s environmental conditions bringing about extreme heatwaves and winters, which will then break down ecosystems and economies.
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The Earth is reaching the point of no return
The threat of collapse is not far off. A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in March 2023 identified irreversible tipping points in the melting ice sheet: “We find that the GIS features two critical volume thresholds, whose crossing would imply extensive further mass loss so that it would be difficult for the ice to grow back, even in thousands of years.”
The research described the following scenarios: If 1,000 gigatons of carbon are released into the atmosphere, a substantial part of the ice sheet will be lost. If 2,500 gigatons of carbon emissions are reached, nearly a complete loss of the GIS will be seen. The twin thresholds will also “cause long-term sea level rise by 1.8 and 6.9 m respectively.” Right now, we’re at 500 gigatons of carbon emissions, the halfway point to the first threshold.
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The cause, as experts have been shouting from the rooftops for decades, is climate change. The warming of the planet destabilises the integrity of the ice sheet, with melting snow and thinning ice contributing to glacier movement and its calving or breaking off into the ocean. And the root of all this, as multiple scientific studies have shown, is human activities, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that produce heat-trapping gasses.
“We cannot continue carbon emissions at the same rate for much longer without risking crossing the tipping points,” said Dennis Höning, the climate scientist who led the study, in a statement. “Most of the ice sheet melting won’t occur in the next decade, but it won't be too long before we will not be able to work against it anymore.”