Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, states that current evidence suggests sea-level will rise faster than previously predicted.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, states that current evidence suggests sea-level will rise faster than previously predicted.
Commenting in the journal Science on several sets of new satellite observations that reveal Greenland’s glaciers are flowing into the sea twice as fast as they were a decade ago, Prof Dowdeswell says that the implications for sea level rise are significant.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is up to 3 km thick at its centre and only slightly smaller than Mexico. If the entire ice sheet melted, sea level would rise by about 7 m. Though it would take a thousand to a few thousand years for this to occur, even small rises in the sea level can have significant implications on coastal communities worldwide.
Prof Dowdeswell said: ‘The finding that a number of very large glaciers draining the Greenland Ice Sheet have doubled in speed in the past few years provides an important mechanism for increased losses of ice to the ocean beyond. Taken together with the observation that melting at the ice-sheet surface is also at record levels, the implication is that global sea level will rise more rapidly than previously thought, and is set to exceed 0.5 m over the next century’.
In the last five years, several huge glaciers draining the ice sheet to the sea have doubled in speed to over 12 km per year. This problem, coupled with the melting of the surface of Greenland’s ice sheets (which also accelerates glaciers sliding by lubricating the underlying bedrock), indicates that global sea level rise over the next century will exceed current estimates of 0.5 m.
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