Greenland s Ice Sheet Teetering on the Edge, Study Warns sputniknews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sputniknews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Tree farts from so-called ghost forests in North Carolina are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, according to experts from North Carolina State University.
Dead trees also known as snags in these ghost forests release carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in trace amounts (as does the nearby soil) that are contributing on some level to greenhouse gases. Even though these standing dead trees are not emitting as much as the soils, they re still emitting something, and they definitely need to be accounted for, the study s lead author Melinda Martinez, a graduate student in forestry and environmental resources at NC State, said in a statement. Even the smallest fart counts.
Accelerated melt. (Credit: TiPES/HP)
(CN) Scientists estimate the melting of Central-Western Greenland ice sheet may be reaching a tipping point, causing the thaw to accelerate.
Even if the artic warming trend is reversed in the coming decades, the change may not be enough to save the massive ice sheet, which is a 660,000 square mile body of ice covering almost 80% of Greenland. It is the second largest ice formation in the world after the Antarctic ice sheet.
Data from the Jakobshavn drainage basin of the ice sheet reveals distinct evidence of the growing melt, according to Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Martin Rypdal from the Arctic University of Norway. The pair of scientists have studied the melt rates and ice-sheet height changes during the last 140 years.
Credit: TiPES/HP
Data from the Jakobshavn drainage basin of the Central-Western Greenland ice sheet reveals the distinct mark of this part of the ice sheet having reached a tipping point. That is the conclusion by Niklas Boers from Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany and Martin Rypdal from the Arctic University of Norway, after careful studies of the development in melt rates and ice-sheet height changes during the last 140 years. The two authors propose close monitoring of the Greenland ice sheet to assess the situation. The work, published in
PNAS today, is part of the TiPES project, coordinated and led by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany.
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Scientists have detected new early-warning signals indicating that the central-western part of the Greenland Ice Sheet may undergo a critical transition relatively soon. Because of rising temperatures, a new study by researchers from Germany and Norway shows, the destabilization of the ice sheet has begun and the process of melting may escalate already at limited warming levels. A tipping of the ice sheet would substantially increase long-term global sea level rise. We have found evidence that the central-western part of the Greenland ice sheet has been destabilizing and is now close to a critical transition, explains lead author Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Free University, Berlin, Germany. Our results suggest there will be substantially enhanced melting in the future - which is quite worrying.