Dawn of a new ice age?

 

The melting of Greenland's ice sheet has accelerated so dramatically in the last three years, that for the first time it is triggering earthquakes that register up to three on the Richter scale.

 

The UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s report issued in February, is already being revised.  Their 2030 forecasts already materialized this summer. Predictions made by the Arctic Council over the last five years have been hopelessly overrun by the extent of the thaw. In a year's time it will have reached 2050 estimates. Consequences of this massive acceleration of the unprecedented thaw are outstripping the capacity of scientific models to predict it.

The IPCC had published a conservative range of between 20cm-60cm rise in sea levels for this century. But those estimates are now heavily disputed, with many scientists insisting that new data collected since the IPCC report six months ago suggested a rise closer to two metres. Greenland's packed ice is up to three kilometres thick and its total collapse into the ocean would raise worldwide sea levels by seven metres.

With its 3 km thick ice barrier, Greenland has been for the last 10 000 years a powerful generator of deep cooling marine currents flowing across the equator to South Africa and back up North into the Indian ocean, returning warm “Gulf Stream” surface waters to Europe. The rapid collapse of Greenland’s ice cap could precipitate a new ice age where temperate climates would disappear from insufficient heat exchange between the poles and the tropics.

 

 

September 20, 2007

TO PRINT News on Science What's new ?

© New Acropolis Canada