Tag: Irreversible

science daily

Most detailed ever study of Greenland ice sheet warns of irreversible ice loss — ScienceDaily

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In a study published this week in The Cryosphere, researchers from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of Reading demonstrate how climate change could lead to irreversible sea level rise as temperatures continue to rise and the Greenland ice sheet continues to decline.

The massive ice sheet faces a point of no return, beyond which it will no longer fully regrow, permanently changing sea levels around the world.

The Greenland ice sheet is seven times the area of the UK, and stores a large amount of the Earth’s frozen water. At current rates of melting, it contributes almost 1mm to sea level per year, and accounts for around a quarter of total sea level rise.

Since 2003, despite seasonal periods of growth, Greenland’s ice sheet has lost three and a half trillion tonnes of ice.

Rising sea levels are one of the most severe effects of climate

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science and technology

Irreversible hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia

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Irreversible hotter and drier climate over inner East Asia
Trees tell a heatwave and drought history of inner East Asia. The image shows a landscape in inner Mongolia, northern China, a Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) tree-ring sample, and a figure showing tree-ring-based heatwave and soil moisture reconstructions from Zhang et al. Science (2020). Credit: Peng Zhang, Hans Linderholm, Zhang et al., Science (2020)

Mongolia’s semi-arid plateau may soon become as barren as parts of the American Southwest due to a “vicious cycle” of heatwaves—that exacerbates soil drying, and ultimately produces more heatwaves—according to an international group of climate scientists.


Writing in the journal Science, the researchers warn that heatwaves and concurrent droughts have increased significantly during the past two decades, with troubling implications for the future. Using tree-ring data, which offer a glimpse of regional climates from before modern weather logs, the researchers developed heatwave and soil moisture records that suggest recent consecutive years of record high

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