Up in the Arctic – where temperatures have risen 3.5 degrees in the last 40 years – an island-size chunk of ice broke off this summer from the Petermann Glacier, one of the two largest glaciers left in Greenland.
It may seem distant, but “what happens in Greenland does not stay in Greenland,” said University of Delaware researcher Andreas Muenchow.
“A first Manhattan-sized section of the 2010 ice island breaking off from Petermann Glacier arrived off Newfoundland last summer where it melted. Go fishing 40 miles off Lewes now, and some of the cold waters 165 feet below the surface may come from that source.”
Here in the Mid-Atlantic, the changes there could mean more intense storms, flooding, higher sea level and changes in the way we live and work.
“Please ignore anyone talking about Greenland’s 8-meter [about 26-foot] potential to raise sea level,” he said. “That’s politically motivated scare-mongery which may take 1,000 to 10,000 years ... and is very unlikely.” In reality, he said, “Greenland’s contribution to global sea-level rise may be between 3 and 4 inches and 3 feet within the next 50 to 100 years” without a decline in the gases that contribute to the earth’s warming.
Those levels are still a concern because the impact is more than just loss of ice. Less ice means less heat reflection and higher ocean temperatures.
“Nobody really knows how much additional warming we will get if the Arctic Ocean becomes free of sea ice in the summer,” he said.
Another unknown, and one Muenchow is working on, is how the influx of freshwater from the melting ice impacts climate.
“Northwest Greenland and northeast Canada are warming more than five times faster than the rest of the world,” he said. “But the observed warming is not proof that the diminishing ice shelf is caused by this, because air temperatures have little effect on this glacier, ocean temperatures do, and our ocean temperature time series are only five to eight years long – too short to establish a robust warming signal.”