Natural History Wanderings

NPR  reports

The vast ice sheet that covers most of Greenland has waxed and waned over hundreds of thousands of years. Today, it is up to 2 miles thick and so packed with ice global sea levels would rise 20 feet if it all melted. But scientists now know that at times deep in the past, the ice sheet shrank back so far that it was almost nonexistent.

A new study published in Nature suggests there may be more wiggle room left for the ice sheet before it sets on an irreversible decline. Even if human-driven climate change pushes global temperatures above that 2C threshold, an increasingly likely possibility, the Greenland ice sheet could avoid full collapse if temperatures come back down relatively quickly, the study says.

Read full story at  There’s a window of hope to save Greenland’s ice sheet from climate change : NPR