Another Warning Bell: Rain On The Highest Point Of Greenland Ice Sheet At 10,500' Above Sea Level
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Last month, for the first time in recorded history, rain fell on the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet. It hardly made the news. But rain in a place historically defined by bitter cold portends a future that will alter coastlines around the world, and drown entire cities.
The Greenland ice sheet contains four times more ice than all of Earth’s other glaciers and ice fields combined, outside Antarctica. The largest island in the world, Greenland is more than 36,000 times the size of Manhattan, and ice covers most of it, in many places thousands of feet thick. As carbon dioxide and methane accumulate in our atmosphere, causing our planet to heat (the six warmest years on record have been the last six), the ice sheet disintegrates. Greenland lost more ice in the past decade than it did in the previous century. Massive summertime meltwater rivers now flow over the ice sheet where, in Nansen’s time, no signs of surface water could be found.
If the people of Miami, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, Lagos, Bangkok and New York are not concerned, they should be. The great Greenland ice melt is a climate crisis sword of Damocles for all coastal, low-lying, densely populated areas. No other single factor will probably contribute more to sea level rise over the next few decades.
A consortium of climate scientists writing two years ago in Nature, a prestigious scientific journal, concluded that if Greenland continues to melt, in one bad-case scenario after another, tens of millions of people could be in danger of yearly flooding and displacement by 2030 – less than nine years from now.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/13/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-fridtjof-nansen
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