Earth Protect Blog

Zombie ice from the massive Greenland ice sheet will eventually raise global sea level by at least 10 inches on its own, according to a study released Monday.

Zombie or doomed ice is ice that is still attached to thicker areas of ice, but is no longer getting fed by those larger glaciers. That’s because the parent glaciers are getting less replenishing snow. Meanwhile, the doomed ice is melting from climate change, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

“It’s dead ice. It’s just going to melt and disappear from the ice sheet,” Colgan said in an interview. “This ice has been consigned to the ocean, regardless of what climate (emissions) scenario we take now.”

Study lead author Jason Box, a glaciologist at the Greenland survey, said it is “more like one foot in the grave.”

The unavoidable 10 inches in the study is more than twice as much sea level rise as scientists had previously expected from the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. The study in the journal Nature Climate Change said it could reach as much as 30 inches. By contrast, last year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report projected a range of 2 to 5 inches for likely sea level rise from Greenland ice melt by the year 2100.

What scientists did for the study was look at the ice in balance. In perfect equilibrium, snowfall in the mountains in Greenland flows down and recharges and thickens the sides of glaciers, balancing out what’s melting on the edges. But in the last few decades there’s less replenishment and more melting, creating imbalance.

Study authors looked at the ratio of what’s being added to what’s being lost and calculated that 3.3% of Greenland’s total ice volume will melt no matter what happens with the world cutting carbon pollution, Colgan said.

One of the study authors said more than 120 trillion tons of ice is already doomed to melt from the warming ice sheet’s inability to replenish its edges. When that ice melts into water, if it were concentrated only over the United States, it would be 37 feet deep.

This is the first time scientists calculated a minimum ice loss — and accompanying sea level rise — for Greenland, one of Earth’s two massive ice sheets that are slowly shrinking because of climate change from burning coal, oil and natural gas. — The Associated Press BBB