Harvard University researchers announced that they had discovered the fingerprint of the Greenland ice sheet melt, identifying the distinct pattern of sea level change caused by melting ice.
What Is Sea Level Fingerprinting?
According to Eurekalert, when ice sheets melt, sea levels rise and fall like a seesaw. Ocean levels fall in areas close to where glacial ice masses melt. They do, however, rise thousands of miles away. It is primarily caused by the loss of a gravitational pull toward the ice sheet, which causes the water to disperse. Because each melting glacier or ice sheet has a unique impact on sea level, the patterns have come to be known as sea level fingerprints.
Sea Level Fingerprint Discovery in Greenland
Scientists agreed that the sea level fingerprints exist in theory. However, the dynamic nature of the ocean has made it difficult for them to identify. In its most recent study, according to a NBC News report, it is the first time that scientists were able to precisely measure the fingerprint.
Because of the large fluctuations in ocean levels caused by changing tides, currents, and winds, sea level fingerprints have been extremely difficult to track. This presents researchers with the challenge of detecting millimeter-level water motions and linking them to melting glaciers thousands of miles away.
Jerry X. Mitrovica, Harvard geophysicist, compared the search to that for the Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle. He said that almost all physicists believed the Higgs existed, but it was a transformative achievement when it was firmly detected.On the other hand, in sea level physics, almost everyone assumed that fingerprints existed. However, they had never been detected at a comparable level of confidence.
Sea Level Fingerprint Discovery
The new study, published in Science, makes use of newly released high-resolution satellite data from a European marine-monitoring agency. More than 30 years of observations around the Greenland Ice Sheet and much of the ocean close to Greenland have been collected by the agency. It captured the rising and falling ocean levels from the fingerprint.
Typically, records from this region only extended as far south as Greenland. However, the data in this new release was 10 degrees higher in latitude. It allowed the scientists to spot a possible indication of the seesaw caused by the fingerprint.
Study Analysis and Results
Sophie Coulson, an expert in modeling sea level change, said she recognized the potential as soon as she saw Mitrovica's message in her inbox.
Mitrovica said that Coulson was the best person to accurately model what the fingerprint would look like given the understanding of how the Greenland Ice Sheet has been losing mass. He said that the sea level expert could establish whether that prediction matched the satellite observation.
Coulson quickly gathered three decades' worth of the best observations she could find on Greenland Ice Sheet ice height change. She also gathered data on glacier height change reconstructions from the Canadian Arctic and Iceland. She used these various data sets to make predictions for the region from 1993 to 2019. She then compared it to new satellite data. She stated that the fit was ideal. It is a one-to-one match, demonstrating with greater than 99.9% certainty that the pattern of sea level change revealed by satellites is a fingerprint of the melting ice sheet.
Normally, it takes years to develop results and then write a paper in scientific research, but the researchers were able to act quickly in this case. From the time they saw the satellite data to the time they submitted the piece, the process took only a few months.
That's because much of the theory, technology, and methods had already been well developed and refined by the time Mitrovica and his colleagues presented their work on sea level fingerprints about 20 years ago-computations that were widely accepted and are now factored into almost all models predicting sea level rise.
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