Blogs & Ecology

European and US researchers who claim they've found a better way of measuring the melting ice cap say they're quite sure that Greenland's melting ice cap makes sea levels rise by half a millimeter annually.

Greenland lost an average of 195 cubic kilometers of ice per year between 2003 and 2008, the researchers say in an article published recently in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. That is enough to cause an annual increase in the global sea level of half a millimetre, or 5 cm over the course of the next century.

On this week’s episode: Greenland wants to bottle glacier H2O. Corn Refiners Association says, “You can have your HFCS and eat it, too.” Big corporations are swallowing up small organic food companies.

photo: kaet44

Recently there’s been a whole bucket full of Arctic climate change bad news, including the news that 83 square miles of Ellesmere Island’s ice shelf has been lost this summer alone due to warming temperatures.

To raise awareness of global warming, one of the two main newspapers in Greenland, Sermitslaq, has set up an 'ice cam' located on one of the largest inland glaciers, Ilulissat, to show it melting - as you watch! Updated hourly. It seems a sad state that we can watch (it is a bit like watching paint dry) though not really do much.

Melting ice, rising seas

photo dsearls @ flickr

It's no secret that TreeHugger isn't fond of single-use bottles of water - there seems no trapping of modern life easier to let go of, when municipalities spend oodles to make most tap water clean, and reusable bottles come in every size and color - there are even some cool ones aimed at getting kids off the one-use bottle!

Icebergs become 'high-end' bottled water

Although researchers may still largely be dealing in uncertainties when it comes to predicting Greenland's exact fate, the data and observations that continue to trickle in suggest a "greener" (see: ice-free) future for the island nation. According to scientists from Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center, there is new evi...

Image from Bart de Haan

The chorus of bad news for Greenland's fate has been growing louder in recent months. I've written at length about numerous studies suggesting that Greenland may not last much longer in light of rapidly increasing carbon emissions. A new study published in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters (sub. required) predicts under which CO2 emissions scenarios Greenland will "irreversibly" undergo total melting.

image: Andrew Davies via flickr

In one more example of the interwoven and far reaching consequences of climate change, a new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research indicates that as Arctic sea ice starts melting more quickly, permafrost hundreds of miles inland could also see accelerated melting. This means climatic changes in Russia, Alaska and Canada could occur more quickly and dramatically than previously expected....

Are Greenland's days already numbered? And, if so, can anything be done to avert the looming disaster posed by a massive sea level rise? The simple answer is that though Greenland's fate is not yet set into stone (at least when it comes to a specific date), the present melting trends do not bode well.

Calling Greenland's potential collapse another climate "tipping point" would be doing it fair justice -- after all, scientists have estimated that were its ice sheet (which holds one-twentieth of the world's ice) to melt completely, global sea levels would jump 7 meters. As