Greenland. (Unsplash Photo)/Penguin News
[뉴스펭귄 남주원 기자] Due to the climate crisis, Greenland’s glaciers are disappearing at a staggering rate of 30 million tonnes per hour.
The research team analyzed Dr. Chad A. Green at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory 240,000 satellite images taken of the location of the Greenland ice sheet terminus every month between 1985 and 2022.
As a result, a total of 5,000㎢ of ice surface area was found to have been lost. Converted to weight, it is about 1 trillion tonnes. As a result of a detailed analysis of area trends using artificial intelligence (AI), glaciers disappeared at an average of 264 billion tonnes per year.
To date, 221 billion tonnes of Greenland’s glaciers are known to be lost each year, but 20% more than this is melting. They found that 30 million tonnes of glacier melt every hour.
Some analyzes say that the Greenland ice sheet has passed the tipping point. Academic circles warn that glacier loss has already reached the point of no return. In the worst case, it is predicted that collapse will start in 2025 and the sea level will rise by 1 to 2 metres.
There are also concerns that the melting of Greenland’s glaciers could affect the circulation of ocean currents. According to this, the world’s major deep ocean current circulation system called the ‘Atlantic Overturning Circulation (hereafter referred to as Amoc)’ could collapse, leading to a serious disaster.
Ocean current circulation occurs due to density differences. However, when the Greenland ice sheet melts, low-density fresh water flows into the North Atlantic, reducing the density difference, thereby weakening the Amoc flow.
As a result, the analysis is that if Amoc were to collapse, it could disrupt global weather patterns, ecosystems, and food security. In fact, the AMOC recently recorded its slowest flow in 1,600 years.
Meanwhile, these research results were published in the international academic journal ‘Nature’ on the 17th (local time).
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