Climate change

Report: Global Warming Reversed Arctic Ice Cap's 2,000-Year Growth

Is this a catastrophic trade for a environmental destruction or a triumph that spares us continent-crushing ice?

5 hours ago·Updated 1 hour ago

Report: Global Warming Reversed Arctic Ice Cap's 2,000-Year Growth

Story

Above: Melting icebergs crowd the Ilulissat Icefjord near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 14, 2024. Image credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The Facts

A study published on Tuesday in the journal Science has reconstructed how the Barnes Ice Cap on Canada's Baffin Island shifted from about 2,000 years of net expansion to retreat in around 1960, with its margin pulling back 200 to 800 meters by 2022.
JoNova
NewsCord
The research, led by Nicolas Young of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, focused on the Barnes Ice Cap, a Delaware-sized remnant of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that is frozen directly to bedrock rather than sliding over it.
Knowridge Science Report
MUSER PRESS
Radiocarbon dating of moss killed by advancing ice allowed the team to map the margin's growth, indicating the ice cap reached its minimum size about 3,000 years ago and began expanding again roughly 2,000 years ago as the climate cooled.
scienmag.com
Time
The expansion reversed around 1960, when summer melting began to outpace winter accumulation, a shift attributed to the greenhouse effect, even as Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continued to decline in a way that would favor renewed glaciation.
Owen Lewis on X
Science
Earlier modeling work from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published in Nature, concluded that moderate future carbon emissions of 1,000 to 1,500 gigatons could postpone the next ice age by at least 100,000 years.
Reason Magazine
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Earlier research in Nature Geoscience placed the next ice age roughly 1,500 years away and found emissions could delay it, a finding that fueled debate over whether averting a distant glaciation offsets warming already underway.
Ian Welsh on X
Business Recorder
Carbon Brief

Sources Split

LEFT

CENTER

RIGHT

ESTAB
CRIT

CENTER

PRO
ESTAB

The Spin

Narrative A

Keeping continent-crushing ice sheets was an unintended, but beneficial consequence of human-driven climate change. Glaciation buried habitable land and dropped sea levels hundreds of feet, and that slow slide back toward the cold had already begun before modern warming overpowered the trend.

Reason Magazine

Owen Lewis on X

Climate-concerned narrative

The revelation that carbon emissions are powerful enough to cancel an ice age thousands of years out should concentrate attention on the reality that global warming is set to make the earth uninhabitable long before then. Nations must urgently join together to address the effects of climate change to protect the future of the planet.

Carbon Brief

Ian Welsh on X

Climate-skeptic narrative

This report is a projection based on a hypothesis yet to be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Ultimately, this is just one study — one interpretation of observable data on one ice cap — that could easily be misconstrued into a much broader and more certain conclusion about the impacts of human fossil fuel usage on global temperature patterns. Skepticism must be exercised.

Medium