Greenland meltdown, a speaker for global change and its impacts
22/05/2025
Marc Oliva et al.
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Profesor at the Faculty of Geography and History
Marc Oliva et al.
Profesor at the Faculty of Geography and History
Although you may have flown over Greenland on a flight to the United States without paying much attention to it, it is likely that you have heard more about the island in the last few months than you have in the rest of your life. But beyond the geopolitical debates or the exploitation of its natural resources, Greenland is key to climate and environmental research.
Over the last decades, more than 80% of the ice-covered territory has seen a loss of ice mass that has exceeded previous estimates by 20%. This accelerated reduction not only has direct consequences for its approximately 56,000 inhabitants, but also has repercussions on a global scale, influencing the rise in sea level and the planet’s climatic balance.
A journey from the past to the future
Understanding the current dynamics of ice loss and glacier retreat requires a long-term view. This must relate current changes to the climatic and environmental conditions of thousands of years ago.
Science lets us reconstruct these past dynamics from various sources of information, such as ice cores extracted from the ice cap or the dating of rocks transported and deposited by ancient glaciers. Sediments accumulated in Arctic lakes also provide valuable data to identify natural and anthropogenic variations in climate over time.
Information on the functioning of ecosystems without human intervention is essential to contextualize their current evolution. The data obtained in the field allow us to calculate the thickness of the ice at different times and to reconstruct its environmental transformations in the face of climatic changes.
This article was originally published in The Conversation.
A journey from the past to the future
Understanding the current dynamics of ice loss and glacier retreat requires a long-term view. This must relate current changes to the climatic and environmental conditions of thousands of years ago.
Science lets us reconstruct these past dynamics from various sources of information, such as ice cores extracted from the ice cap or the dating of rocks transported and deposited by ancient glaciers. Sediments accumulated in Arctic lakes also provide valuable data to identify natural and anthropogenic variations in climate over time.
Information on the functioning of ecosystems without human intervention is essential to contextualize their current evolution. The data obtained in the field allow us to calculate the thickness of the ice at different times and to reconstruct its environmental transformations in the face of climatic changes.
This article was originally published in The Conversation.