Zombie ice from Greenland will raise sea level 10 inches

Zombie ice from Greenland will raise sea level 10 inches

Subject: Geography

Section: Physical geography

Context:

• A new study finds that Greenland has more than 120 trillion tons of ice that can be thought of as zombie ice that’s going to raise sea level globally by at least 10 inches

Zombie ice

• It’s dead ice. It’s just going to melt and disappear from the ice sheet.
• That’s doomed ice that, while still attached to thicker areas of ice, is no longer getting replenished by parent glaciers now receiving less snow.
• Without replenishment, the doomed ice is melting from climate change and will inevitably raise seas, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
• This ice has been consigned to the ocean, regardless of climate (emissions) scenario

The Greenland ice sheet

• The Greenland ice sheet is much smaller than the Antarctic Ice sheet, only about 1.7 million square kilometers (656,000 square miles).
• It is still the second-largest body of ice on the planet. The Greenland ice sheet interacts much more dynamically with the ocean than the Antarctic ice sheet.

Greenland

• Greenland is the world’s largest island located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
• It is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark.
• Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe (specifically Norway and Denmark, the colonial powers).