FILE – A boat sails past icebergs near the eastern Greenland town of Kulusuk on Aug. 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)
PA
Since 1995, Greenland’s temperatures have soared to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average, the warmest in more than 1,000 years, according to new data from the cores of ice.
Until now, Greenland’s ice cores—a look at long-term temperatures before the thermometers—hadn’t shown a very clear sign of global warming in the more remote north-central part of the island, at least compared to the rest of the world. But ice cores hadn’t been updated since 1995 either. Newly analyzed cores, drilled in 2011, show a dramatic rise in temperature over the previous 15 years, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“We continue to see an increase in temperatures between 1990 and 2011,” said Maria Hoerhold, lead author of the study and a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “We now have a clear signature of global warming.”
Analyzing data from ice cores takes years. Hoerhold has new data from 2019, but hasn’t finished studying it yet. He expects the temperature rise to continue as Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers have melted more rapidly of late.
“This is an important finding and corroborates the suspicion that ‘absent warming’ in ice cores is due to the fact that the cores end before strong warming starts,” said climate scientist Martin Stendel of the Danish Meteorological Institute, which was not part of the investigation.
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Source: El Nuevo Herald
