Global Warming Exposes New Island in the Arctic

[Linda Sohl]

certvista, the article you linked to (from Feb. 2007) points out that widespread ice sheet melting "could take centuries, but increased warming caused by a failure to cut emissions would accelerate the ice sheets' demise." The article also says, "The IPCC science report predicted sea level rises of up to 0.59m by the end of the century. But that does not include the possible contribution from ice sheets, because the experts judged it too unpredictable to forecast over short timescales."

As Mark mentioned in the post above yours, we really do not know how the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, say, will proceed. For that, we'd need to have a much better understanding about the dynamics of ice sheet flow in general, and of the current patterns of flow in each individual ice sheet itself. There are ice sheet models that can mimic ice sheet behavior to a limited extent, but they really need more observational data to be improved. Such observational studies, like the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP) and the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2), are very expensive and require years of planning, data collection and data analysis. If you were to start planning a new coring project on the Greenland ice sheet tomorrow, chances are good that analysis of the data collected would still be in the early stages ten years from now.

It would be a difficult project in any case, even without the added complication of trying to predict how human behavior (re the willingness to reduce emissions, or not) might influence climate change in the near term. So unfortunately, there is no way to predict how advanced ice sheet melting will be - and what new features will be revealed along the Greenland coast - within ten years' time.

At the time the linked article was written, the new IPCC report had not yet been published. It since has been, and is available here: IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. Working Group II's portion of the report includes a chapter on projecting future changes. However, as far as sea level is concerned, the report notes that ice sheet melting contributions to sea level rise are NOT included, precisely because we know too little still about ice sheet behavior.