A research by universities based in Scotland and Norway shows that the rapid collapse of ancient ice sheets from Iceland shows the impact of modern-day climate and sea-level change. This observation further proves the clues of the effect of climate change.
For the first time, scientists were able to reconstruct in detail the evolution of the ice sheet that covered the island of Iceland 20,000 years ago. Scientists also show that the greatest changes of the ice sheets took place at a time when the temperature rose around 3°C in the Northern Hemisphere in just 500 years.
The maximum rate of loss ice sheets in Iceland then was still on the same scale seen in West Antartica and Greenland today. This provides some worrying evidence of how climate change could alter the world's ice sheets that lead to rapid sea level rise.
Tom Bradwell from University of Stirling Faculty of Natural Sciences, Scotland said that 22,000 years ago, the climate became warm from the last Ice Age and entered a gradual period of warming. With this, it triggered the melting and collapsing of huge ice sheets that covered North America and Eurasia one.
In their study, Bradwell found that Icelandic ice sheets are collapsing at an exceptionally and worrying fast rate. It is more than double the present-day rate of ice loss from the much larger West Antartic ice sheet. With this, it causes global sea level today to rise significantly, Science Daily has reported.
"By using data from the geological record to constrain model reconstructions of rapid ice sheet change thousands of years ago, we can better predict how contemporary ice sheets will probably react in the future and the serious impact they have on sea level rise," Henry Patton of the Arctic University of Norway said. He also said that the satellite data they collated shows that the present polar ice sheets are responding to the climate change and global warming.
The research was supported by the Research Council of Norway. This is part of a collaboration between the scientists in the Universities of Tromso, Aberystwyth, and Stirling in understanding ice sheet evolution.
