The Greenland Ice Sheet is more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. School of Arts & Sciences assistant professor Jon Hawkings unpacks new research.
2 min. read
How will massive, continental glaciers known as ice sheets respond to climate change in the future? Surprising new research from a team including assistant professor of earth & environmental science Jon Hawkings offers an unsettling look.
Published in Nature Geoscience, the findings link widespread methane emissions from beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet to a warming period dating back just a few thousand years. According to Hawkings, that “strongly suggests that the Greenland Ice Sheet responds much more quickly to climate change than we previously assumed.”
Prior warm periods are a good indication of how the world’s two contemporary ice sheets—which cover Greenland and Antarctica—will react to the effects of modern climate change. The researchers dated the methane emerging from beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet back around 5,000 years ago, where temperatures similar to those in the present day sparked the Holocene Thermal Maximum period.
These methane data indicate that during that period, the ice sheet had retreated well beyond its present extent. That allowed vegetation and soils to develop in its place before the ice advanced and covered it again. “This means that the temperature increases we’ve seen over the last few decades and the warming expected in the next century will very likely lead to a smaller Greenland Ice Sheet, potentially much smaller if worse-case scenarios play out,” Hawkings says.
Among other groundbreaking achievements, the project is the first of its kind to establish the age of methane emerging from an ice sheet, through stable isotope analysis and radiocarbon dating. “The carbon in the methane was 1,500 to 4,500 years old,” says Hawkings, noting that this finding helped the researchers link Greenland’s large stores of methane to the Holocene Thermal Maximum.
For years, methane—a potent greenhouse gas—has been detected at glacier margins, sometimes in very high concentrations. But questions remained as to whether these readings were anomalies or outliers.
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