Greenland records warmest climate in 1,000 years, study finds

Temperatures in some areas of Greenland were the highest in a thousand years, said on Friday (20) the co-author of a study that reconstructed past climate conditions through drilling holes in the ice.

“This confirms the bad news that we unfortunately already know, [está] Of course we need to keep this warming under control to stop Greenland from melting,” Bo Mollesoe Vinther, professor of climate physics at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP.

By drilling through the layers to sample snow and ice from hundreds of years ago, scientists have been able to reconstruct what temperatures were like in northern and central Greenland from AD 1000 to 2011.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show that the warming recorded in the decade between 2001 and 2011 “almost certainly exceeds the range of pre-industrial and last millennium temperature variability”.

During that decade, the temperature was “on average 1.5°C warmer than in the 20th century”, found the study.

Melting ice off Greenland is already the main cause of rising sea levels, threatening the lives of millions of people living in coastal areas that could be under water in the coming decades or centuries.

The Greenland ice cap is currently the main driver of ocean growth, according to NASA, and the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet.

“The evidence of global warming that we see around the world is also in these remote parts of the Greenland ice sheet,” explained Vinther.

“We need to stop this before we get to the point where there is a vicious cycle of self-sustaining melting of Greenland ice,” he warned.