Exploring the greenland Ice sheet: implications for climate change past and presnt

Professor Dorthe Dahlhensen

Thursday 1 March, 6 pm, Academy House

Click here to download speakers presentation from the event

The Greenland Ice Sheet is reacting to the recent climate change and is losing more and more mass for every year. One of our challenges in the future is to adapt to rising sea level. Looking into the past gains us knowledge on how the ice sheets react to changing climate of the past and this knowledge can be used to improver predictions of sea level rise in the future. The deep ice cores from Greenland contain information on the past climate more than 130.000 years back in time.

The first results from the new Greenland ice core from the drill site named NEEM are presented and combined with the results from the other deep ice cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet.

All the ice cores drilled though the Greenland ice sheets have been analyzed and the results show that all the ice cores contain ice from the previous warm Eemian climate period, 130.000 to 155000 years before present. Is it thus clear that the Greenland Ice Sheet did exist for 120.000 years ago in this warm climate period where it was 5 oC warmer over Greenland and the sea level has been estimate to have been 5-8 m higher than the present sea level?
(image courtesy of Nasa)

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