(ORDO NEWS) — An international team of climatologists has concluded that the rate of glacier melt and global sea level rise will accelerate sharply after climate warming of 1.8 degrees Celsius or more as a result of the fact that the melting of the ice masses of Greenland and West Antarctica will become virtually irreversible.
“If humanity fails to keep warming at around 1.8 degrees Celsius, then the ice massifs of Greenland and West Antarctica will break up and begin to melt rapidly.
If we do nothing, these processes in themselves will lead to an increase in sea level by at least meter in the next 130 years,” said IBS professor Axel Timmermann, quoted by the institute’s press service.
Professor Timmermann and his colleagues have found that sea level rise will accelerate dramatically in the coming decades if humanity fails to keep global warming at around 1.8 degrees Celsius.
Climatologists came to this conclusion using the most detailed computer model they created of the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica.
As the researchers explain, this model took into account how the melting of glaciers is affected by various changes in their structure, including the appearance of cracks, splits, icebergs, accumulations of melt water on the ice surface and other processes that can potentially accelerate the movement of ice mass towards the sea and decrease in its total volume.
Calculations carried out by scientists have shown that climate warming by 1.8 degrees Celsius will launch a kind of self-sustaining chain reaction that will dramatically accelerate the process of melting glaciers in the next century and a half.
This is due to the fact that a further increase in temperatures will lead to destabilization and splitting of the glaciers of Greenland and West Antarctica, as a result of which the process of their melting will accelerate by about 30 times, and it will no longer be possible to stop it.
As a result, the sea level, according to the calculations of Professor Timmermann and his colleagues, will rise by about a meter by the year 2150 only due to the melting of these two collapsing ice masses, and in an unfavorable combination of circumstances, the rise in world sea level will be more than 140 cm.
This will give rise to a lot of problems for the infrastructure of coastal cities and states, summed up the scientists.
Global warming
Almost all climatologists have no doubt that global warming exists and that it will radically change the face of the planet if the temperature increase cannot be kept at around 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This is evidenced not only by hundreds of computer models of the planet’s climate, but also by thousands of measurements obtained using various climate satellites, land meteorological stations and ocean buoys.
This process, as scientists suggest, will lead to a significant rise in world sea levels due to the melting of the glaciers of Greenland and the Arctic, as well as the most vulnerable ice massifs of West Antarctica.
According to UN experts, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at current rates, sea levels will rise by about 30-50 cm by the end of this century.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.