Scientists predict that climate change may be near a "tipping point", where the entire ice sheet will melt (map) in about two thousand years. If the entire 2,850,000 cubic kilometres of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of seven meters.Rico says this question came up after, in Rico's typical style, he said 'fuck the polar bears, bring on global warming' to his old friend Bill, who noted that "the polar bears did just fine, back when Greenland was actually green". But, since polar bears evolved fairly recently, they may never have actually seen Greenland as green...
The ice in the current ice sheet is as old as a hundred thousand years. The presence of ice-rafted sediments in deep-sea cores recovered off of northeast Greenland, in the Fram Strait, and south of Greenland indicated the more or less continuous presence of either an ice sheet or ice sheets covering significant parts of Greenland for the last eighteen million years. From just before eleven million years ago to a little after ten million years ago, the Greenland Ice Sheet appears to have been greatly reduced in size. The Greenland Ice Sheet formed in the middle Miocene by coalescence of ice caps and glaciers. There was an intensification of glaciation during the Late Pliocene.
24 January 2013
Not in our lifetimes
Wikipedia has an article about the Greenland ice sheet, of which these are excerpts:
No comments:
Post a Comment
No more Anonymous comments, sorry.