SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATE: March 28, 2018
SNIP: Scientists who crossed western Greenland with a fleet of snowmobiles, pulling up long cylinders of ice at camps a little more than a mile above sea level, have found evidence that the vast sheet of ice is melting faster than at any time in the past 450 years at least — and possibly much longer than that.
That’s worrisome, because the snow that has fallen on the island over millennia — now compacted into ice — could raise sea levels by 20 feet if it completely melted.
The new study is further evidence that Greenland is seeing a lot of melt in the present, but what’s novel is the ability to put that in context, said Twila Moon, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center who studies Greenland but was not involved in the current study.
“It’s just another type or form of evidence to support the fact that we’re seeing really dramatic, rapid, and probably unprecedented changes,” Moon said.
Based on such research, “I am personally fully confident that we haven’t seen melt like this for 5,000 years,” Osterberg said.