Glass
27th October 2015, 11:29 PM
Greenland is melting and the consequences could be catastrophic
Greenland ice sheet: The midnight sun still gleamed at 1am across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept to the edge of a river that rushed downstream towards an enormous sinkhole.
If he fell in, "the death rate is 100 per cent", said Mr Overstreet's friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.
But Mr Overstreet's task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield ground-breaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland's ice sheet could increase sea levels by more than six metres.
For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet's warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.
Link to BS Story on The Age. (http://www.theage.com.au/world/greenland-is-melting-and-the-consequences-could-be-catastrophic-20151027-gkk9kc.html)
Greenland ice sheet: The midnight sun still gleamed at 1am across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept to the edge of a river that rushed downstream towards an enormous sinkhole.
If he fell in, "the death rate is 100 per cent", said Mr Overstreet's friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.
But Mr Overstreet's task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield ground-breaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland's ice sheet could increase sea levels by more than six metres.
For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet's warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have created models to simulate the thawing, they have little on-the-ground information and so have trouble predicting precisely how fast sea levels will rise.
Link to BS Story on The Age. (http://www.theage.com.au/world/greenland-is-melting-and-the-consequences-could-be-catastrophic-20151027-gkk9kc.html)