A new study of Greenland’s ice cores indicates that rising temperatures bear the ‘clear signature of global warming’.
New data has revealed that temperatures in Greenland are the warmest they have been in 1,000 years, underscoring the growing impact of human-driven climate change on the natural world.A study published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday found that temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average since 1995. The data shows that Greenland’s ice cores — samples taken from deep within ice sheets and glaciers — have warmed substantially.
“We keep on [seeing] rising temperatures between the 1990s and 2011,” said the study’s lead author Maria Hoerhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “We have now a clear signature of global warming.”
As fossil fuel consumption releases carbon into the atmosphere and warms the planet, scientists have warned that governments have yet to make the changes needed to avert the worst repercussions of global warming.
In November, a United Nations report found that many of the world’s most famous glaciers could disappear by 2050 as the planet warms. Of the more than 18,600 glaciers the organisation monitors across 50 World Heritage Sites, about one-third are expected to vanish by mid-century.
Another study found that two-thirds of the world’s glaciers are expected to disappear by 2100.
Greenland’s ice cores, which reveal information about long-term temperature changes, take time to analyse. Data from the cores had last been updated in 1995 and previously suggested that Greenland was not warming as quickly as the rest of the Arctic region.
However, the newly analysed cores, taken in 2011, show a sharp rise over the last 15 years.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/18/greenland-temperatures-hottest-in-1000-years-study