Researchers ran hundreds of simulations for different climate scenarios to see how the ice will respond in the coming centuries.
Scientists have warned that Greenland will be ice-free in the next thousand years unless greenhouse gas emissions are substantially reduced. Using three different climate change scenarios, a team of researchers ran hundreds of simulations to see how the ice would respond in the future.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is a huge mass almost the size of Alaska—but it has started to disintegrate. Subsurface ocean temperatures along its west coast rose by 1.5 C between 1996 and 1998, causing the ice sheet to retreat and thin. Scientists are worried that warming could cause it to collapse—an event predicted to raise sea levels so much that it would submerge a number of major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans.
Using these three climate change scenarios, a team of researchers led by Andy Aschwanden from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, developed a model for how Greenland will respond to warming and ran 500 computer simulations to show what could happen over the next 1,000 years. The model took into account atmospheric and ocean conditions as well as ice geometry, flow and thickness.
"How Greenland will look in the future—in a couple of hundred years or in 1,000 years—whether there will be Greenland, or at least a Greenland similar to today, it's up to us," Aschwanden said in a statement.
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