14 DAY TRIAL // In spite of looking like a giant stretch of ice in the Northern Pacific, Greenland fulfills a number of functions in the region, not the least important of them being the fact that it helps keep the North Pole cool. The way it manages to accomplish that is by being large and white, in the purest of senses. Light coming in from the Sun simply bounces off the large, white glaciers, and is redirected back into the atmosphere, without reaching the ice shelves in the Arctic. But the fact that the glaciers on the island are currently melting at an increasingly faster rate is nothing but bad news.
In addition to keeping the Arctic cool, Greenland's ices also help keep more water out of the ocean. If all the ices on the island melted, then the level of the world's oceans would increase considerably, affecting millions around the world. Such a catastrophe would also ignite a vicious circle, in which the lack of ice would allow more sunlight at the North Pole, accelerating the melting process at that location as well. Already, the situation is tense, because warming water does the same thing. But in a war from two sides – warm water and more sunlight –, floating ice sheets cannot win.
Unlike Antarctica, where huge amounts of land ice rest on a continent larger than Europe, the Arctic has all its ices resting on nothing more than the surface of the ocean. Therefore, if the waters warm, they “attack” from all sides, relentlessly. Current estimates show that, if the current state of affairs persists, then the North Pole could lose all its ices during summertime in as little as 30 years, maybe even less. It therefore stands to reason that a lot hangs on Greenland keeping its ices. But the island appears to be losing them faster every year, the BBC News reports.
“Since 2000, there's clearly been an accelerating loss of mass [from the ice sheet]. But we've had three very warm summers, and that's enhanced the melt considerably. If this is going to continue, I cannot tell – but we do of course expect the climate to become warmer in the future,” Michiel van den Broeke says. He is the lead researcher on a new study detailing the situation of the island's glaciers, and also an expert at the Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. The paper appears in the latest issue of the top journal Science.
“I think it's a very significant paper; the results in it are certainly very significant and new. It does show that the [ice loss] trend has accelerated, and the reported contribution to sea level rise also shows a significant acceleration – so if you multiply these numbers up it puts us well beyond the IPCC estimates for 2100,” University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB) World Data Center for Glaciology Director Roger Barry says. The expert was also an editor on the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on global warming, for the section covering the polar regions.