According to a research that was published on November 5, 2023 in Nature Communications, Greenland's last surviving ice shelves are rapidly eroding as the ocean heats, endangering the neighboring glaciers and raising the possibility of "dramatic" implications for sea level rise.
As tongues of floating ice protruding over the ocean, ice shelves serve as barriers that impede land-based glaciers and reduce the rate of ice loss. Sea levels increase as a result of them melting and becoming weaker, which allows more land-based ice to slip into the ocean. Researchers examined eight ice shelves supporting northern Greenland's glaciers, which combined contain enough ice to raise sea levels by 2.1 meters, or about 7 feet, in the event that they fully melt.
According to Romain Millan, a glaciologist at Grenoble Alpes University in France and one of the study's authors, "these glaciers are among the most important of the ice sheet," CNN reported. "Those are Greenland's largest glaciers."He noted that while glaciers in other parts of Greenland began to recede in mass in the 1980s and 1990s, northern Greenland glaciers "have remained relatively stable" up to this point.