Greenland passed tipping point. Global Warming.
Greenland passed tipping point. Global warming is causing more ice in Greenland to melt than is being replaced.
This blog has been gleaned from an article dated 14th August, 2020 by Mr Scott Snowden who covers environmental technology for Forbes magazine.
In the 21st Century novel, The Battle for Jesus, Jesus returns to avert the perils of global warming/climate change.
Greenland passed tipping point: Greenland’s glaciers have shrunk to such an extent that even if global warming was to cease the ice sheets would continue to melt.
Satellite information collected over the past forty years shows that Greenland’s glaciers have passed a tipping point whereby annual snow fall cannot replenish the amount of the ice melting and running into the ocean. The shrinkage of the glaciers cannot be stopped.
The Forbes article quotes Ms Michalea King, a researcher at the Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Centre, USA, as saying, “What we’ve found is that the ice that’s discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that’s accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet.”
Satellite data from over two hundred prominent glaciers draining into the ocean around Greenland measure how much ice breaks off or melts from them and flows into the ocean. They studied the amount of snowfall each year which replenish these glaciers and discovered that in the 1980’s and 1990’s there was pretty much an equal amount of snowfall to ice melt. The balance between the two was being maintained.
However, over the past ten years this pattern has now changed. The ice melt has significantly increased while the snow fall has remained relatively the same. So, the ice melt is now faster than it is being replenished with insufficient snow to rebuild the ice sheets or the glaciers.
There is now a constant state of ice sheet loss. This means that the sea level will continue to rise, gradually but constantly.
Picture below: Township Qaanaaq, home to about 600 people in Greenland, approx 700 miles within the arctic circle, late summer 2007. The ice has melted in the surrounding water and immediate hills. Photo courtesy of Col. Lee-Volker Cox, U.S. Airforce, via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Note: this picture is not in the Forbes Magazine article. It has been added to this blog to demonstrate the situation. Ice cover can be seen in the distant hills but, even though this picture was taken in late summer, you can see it has totally gone in the immediate area.
A comparatively small amount of ice melt in Greenland will have a devastating effect on the world as a whole. And, we now know that Greenland has passed the tipping point.
This study is of Greenland only which makes up a large part of the North Pole, or the Arctic.
Ice is melting and carving at a spectacular rate in the South Pole or Antarctica. Also, glaciers feeding the major rivers across Asia and the Far East are also retreating, adding to the problem.
The planet is in dire straits. Now is the only window of opportunity to avert the perils of global warming.
Note: The Greenland ice sheet is about the same size as the state of Alaska with parts of it ten thousand feet thick. It contains enough ice to raise the sea level globally by twenty three feet or seven metres.
Across the 20th century, Greenland lost approximately nine thousand billion tons of ice which rose the global sea level by 25 millimetres.
It takes about three hundred and sixty billion tons of ice to raise the global sea-level by one millimetre.
A small rise in sea-level can have devastating effects:
Photo on left: Courtesy of Metropolitan Transport Authority of the State of New York by Patrick Cashin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0
The picture on the left of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel, formerly known as the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel in lower Manhattan, New York, after Hurricane Sandy in October 30, 2012 flooded by a sea surge. Note: this photo is not from the Forbes Magazine article, but it is similar.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012, a category two hurricane swept passed New York, flooding subway tunnels and causing havoc in the streets of Brooklyn and the Hugh L. Carey tunnel.
The storm surge was fourteen feet high causing over seventy billion dollars of damage. The above pictures are a harbinger of what is to come.
In the Book, The Battle for Jesus, a 21st Century story, Jesus returns with icons of the Holy Land to avert the perils of global warming and save the world. Jesus achieves this by steering governments away from the idea of war and domination and onto global unification for the benefit of us all.