One of the countries that has the most ice on its borders could suffer the ravages of an unforgiving climate.
Although we often imagine Greenland As an area filled with large ice sheets, this island is a autonomous danish territory inhabited, which could be one of the places most affected by the consequences of climate change. It is possible to visit some of its towns and marvel, for example, at the well-known northern lights, but perhaps we have to consider what would happen if Greenland ends by disappear.
The natural disaster that could eliminate Greenland from the Earth’s map
The answer to the question we asked at the end of the previous paragraph seems to have come from the hand of a group of scientists who have published a article in Nature magazine in which they expose the worst possible scenarioone in which the ice sheet collapses and rising sea levels are an inevitable consequence
Nature research paper: Overshooting the critical threshold for the Greenland ice sheet https://t.co/fTNMpzM3Im
—nature (@Nature) October 18, 2023
Today, we know that the Greenland ice sheet this losing about 300 million cubic meters per year, which implies that sea level rises at a rate of one millimeter annually. The most pessimistic case, in which all the ice disappears, tells us that sea level would rise by 7 meters, something that, of course, would completely change the face of the Earth.
In this case, the scientists involved in the research have used computer models To generate possibles scenarios and predict ice behavior based on predicted changes in climate and changes in the ice sheet itself. However, there are factors that still need to be thoroughly investigated to make these models truly reliable.
Maps like this are devastating, not because of the devastating heat wave in China or the intense cold recorded in Greenland, but because today almost average values on our planet no longer exist. Today’s climate change is extremes and extremes destroy ecosystems pic.twitter.com/aVllT2QZtK
— Mario Picazo (@picazomario) September 27, 2021
Although we are dealing with a job that must continue to evolve, the first results They are very interesting. For example, If temperatures rise by about 2ºC and they remained at that point, they would have to pass thousands of years to meet him collapse from Greenland. However, if we manage to stop climate change after the year 2100, even though the ice cover decreases, it could stabilize.
Even so, all the data indicates that it is very difficult to recover from climate change in case it takes us a long time to lower the planet’s temperature. There are still many uncertainties on the way, but it seems that we can accommodate the hope that our planet will be a habitable place for many centuries, if we build a civilization in harmony with nature.