• The climate crisis has impacted the island country over time.
• Melting ice has a significant global impact.
• The average temperature between 2001 and 2011 was 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Scientists are piecing together Greenland‘s history by drilling ice cores to analyze how the climate crisis has impacted the island country over time as humans fiddle with the planet’s thermostat. The deeper they drilled, the further back in time they went, allowing them to distinguish which temperature fluctuations were natural and which were caused by humans.

After years of studying the Greenland ice sheet, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that temperatures there have been the warmest in at least the last 1,000 years – the longest time period for which their ice cores could be analyzed. And they discovered that the average temperature between 2001 and 2011 was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was during the twentieth century.

Human-caused climate change, according to the report’s authors, has played a significant role in the dramatic rise in temperatures in the critical Arctic region, where melting ice has a significant global impact.

“Greenland is currently the largest contributor to sea level rise,” said Maria Hörhold, lead author of the study and a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute. “And if we continue at our current rate of carbon emissions, Greenland will have contributed up to 50 centimeters to sea level rise by 2100, affecting millions of people who live in coastal areas.”

Global warming

“If you’re going to say something is global warming, you have to know what the natural variation was before humans interacted with the atmosphere,” she says. “You have to go back in time, to the pre-industrial era, when humans did not emit [carbon dioxide] into the atmosphere.”

There were no weather stations in Greenland that collected temperature data like today during pre-industrial times. That is why the scientists studied the region’s warming patterns using paleoclimate data, such as ice cores. According to Hörhold, the last robust ice core analysis in Greenland ended in 1995, and that data did not detect warming despite climate change already being visible elsewhere.

“By extending the period to 2011, we can show that, ‘Well, there is actually warming,'” she added. “The warming trend has been present since 1800, but it has been hidden by strong natural variability.”

Scientists believe that significant warming in Greenland’s ice sheet is approaching a tipping point that could result in catastrophic melting. According to NASA, Greenland has enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 24 feet if it all melted.

Since then, Greenland has experienced extreme weather. In 2019, an unusually warm spring and a July heat wave caused almost the entire surface of the ice sheet to melt, releasing approximately 532 billion tonnes of ice into the sea. As a result, scientists predicted that the global sea level would rise by 1.5 millimeters.

Then, in 2021, rain fell for the first time on record at Greenland’s summit – roughly two miles above sea level. The warm air then fueled an extreme rain event, dumping 7 billion tonnes of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill Washington, DC’s National Mall’s Reflecting Pool nearly 250,000 times.

Because extreme events in Greenland are becoming more common, Hörhold said the team will continue to monitor the situation.

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