Global warming is wiping out the ice on our entire planet. This has serious consequences on all the world's ecosystems and on temperatures. The thaw is advancing by leaps and bounds and is causing the Greenland ice sheet to be disappearing.
An investigation by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) has revealed that about 400.000 years ago there was global warming similar to the current one and that it the Greenland ice sheet almost completely disappeared. Will the same happen today?
Greenland thaw
This study has discovered the existence of a thaw that almost caused the disappearance of the entire Greenland mantle. To find out if the same warming can cause similar damage today, se have recreated the climatic conditions of the region using a coupled climate-ice model. This is crucial, as the differences between the climate change and global warming, topics that must be understood to address this phenomenon adequately.
Once a thawing process begins, it is very difficult to stop it. In the previous global warming suffered by the Earth, it took several thousand years for the thaw to become important. However, our current global warming is happening in just a few centuries (since the Industrial Revolution). If you want to understand more about how this warming came about, check out our detailed guide on the origin of global warming.
This model has for the first time recreated the dynamics that the ice has with respect to the existing climate in Greenland during the interglacial period. It is useful to know the past of this global warming to be able to act in the present, given that the temperatures were slightly higher than the current ones and the global height of the oceans it reached a level between 6 and 13 meters above the current one. This leads us to reflect on the effects of global warming on sea level, a topic that can be explored further in our article on sea level rise.
It must be considered that if global warming and the disappearance of the Greenland ice sheets occurred 400.000 years ago without industrial activity, it is evident that this could happen again. The main conclusion is that the Greenland ice sheet is sensitive to slight climate changes, and if its melting occurred more than XNUMX years ago, it is likely to happen again.
