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What Greenland’s Ancient Past Reveals about Its Fragile Future

 The collapse of the world’s second-largest ice sheet would drown cities
worldwide. Is that ice more vulnerable than we know?

Last year, Scientific American chief multimedia editor Jeffery DelViscio spent a month on the
Greenland ice sheet, reporting on the work of scientists taking ice and
rock cores from the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) and the bedrock
underneath. This massive flow of ice drains ice into the ocean, and its
melt has been speeding up in the past decade.

Bedrock samples under ice
from an area in northwest Greenland indicate it was ice-free as recently as
about 7,000 years ago when global temperatures were only a few degrees
warmer than they are now. The sheet won’t melt all at once, of course,
but scientists are increasingly concerned by signs of accelerating
ice-sheet retreat. A recent report showed that it has been losing mass
every year for the past 27 years. Another study found that nearly every
Greenlandic glacier has thinned or retreated in the past few decades.

The NEGIS itself has extensively sped up and thinned over the past decade. If
the entire Greenland ice sheet melted, global sea levels would rise by
about 24 feet, inundating coastal cities, farmland and homes. “I have,
for the first time ever in my career, datasets that take my sleep away at
night,” says Joerg Schaefer, GreenDrill’s co-principal investigator.
“They are so direct and tell me this ice sheet is in so much trouble.”

 Scientific American 17th June 2025, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/greenlands-ice-sheet-collapse-could-be-closer-than-we-think/

July 12, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | ARCTIC, climate change