When we think of Greenlandthe image that automatically comes to mind is that of a terrain with a large amount of snow and very cold. But science has bad news for this country belonging to Denmark: the Greenland ice sheet It is much more fragile than we could think.. And that is a problem.
From the terrestrial bottom. This statement is not something that has been extracted on paper, but rather has been ‘seen’ in the depths of the earth. This way, after drilling more than 500 meters of ice at Prudhoe Domeresearchers have found evidence that this gigantic mass completely disappeared just 7,000 years ago and then resurface.
And the worst thing is not that it happened thousands of years ago, but that now the temperatures that caused that collapse are the same ones we hope to reach by the year 2100.
The GreenDrill project. The researchers recently published in Nature on this project, which has been made possible thanks to a technical feat. To achieve this, the team drilled about 509 meters to reach the sediments that rest beneath the base of Prudhoe Dome, a 2,500 km² ice dome in northwest Greenland.
To find out exactly what happened there, scientists used a technique called cell dating. infrared stimulated luminescence. In this way, what is allowed is to see when was the last time that part of this deep ice was exposed to the radiation of sunlight.
The results. They were pretty clear: the sediments beneath Prudhoe Dome saw the sun between 6,000 and 8,200 years ago. This can be translated into a very simple sentence: at that time, there was no 500 meters of ice above, so the dome simply did not exist. And that is now a problem.
Because? At that time Greenland ended up melting due to the ‘Holocene Thermal Maximum’. During this period, temperatures in the Arctic were between 3 and 5 °C higher than the pre-industrial era. And this is exactly where the data becomes really worrying.
Worrying because precisely those temperatures that thousands of years ago erased entire ice domes from the map are the exact range of heating that climate models predict for the end of this century if emissions are not drastically reduced. This is why the ice we see today is not an eternal relic of the Ice Age; It is a structure that has collapsed before under conditions we are about to replicate.
The domino effect. Prudhoe Dome is just one piece of the puzzle, but its past disappearance suggests that much of the northwestern sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet was much reduced during the early Holocene.
The conclusion to this is quite clear: if history repeats itself and the Greenland ice sheet completely melts, global sea level it would rise about 7.3 meters. But logically it is not something that will happen tomorrow, but rather the process of fusion of the entire island will still take several centuries. Although if the estimates are met, it may go faster than you think.
Change the rules of the game. Until now, the central, thickest areas of Greenland were thought to be almost indestructible. This study demonstrates that even massive domes 500 meters thick can fade in geologically short periods. And this is something that has already happened as science points out.
Images | Visit Greenland
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