A new study published in Nature Communications revealed that the rising temperature in the Arctic is linked to summer ice melt in Greenland.
Climatologists seemed to have found traces of Arctic amplification- a faster warming of the Arctic region than any other place in the Northern Hemisphere causing sea ice to gradually disappear.
The study showed that the effects of Arctic amplification occurred in Greenland in 2015 leading to record summer ice melt as a northern swing of jet stream reached further north at that time of the year.
Greenland holds the Earth's second largest ice sheet after Antarctica. If the ice it holds were melt entirely, it would significantly raise the world's sea level by 7 meters (22.9659 ft.) on average. By identifying the factors that drive massive ice melting near the earth's polar ice caps, scientists would be able to discern how freshwater runoff from Greenland's melted ice will impact the global ocean circulation.
"If loss of sea ice is driving changes in the jet stream, the jet stream is changing Greenland, and this, in turn, has an impact on the Arctic system as well as the climate," said lead author Marco Tedesco, research professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and adjunct scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) as quoted by Global News.
The report also noted that the jet stream has reached 76 degrees latitude up north, nearly two degrees than the 2009 record. As indicated in the NOAA's Arctic report card compiled by the study's authors, the ice melt in Greenland reached summer record levels that "exceeded more than half of the ice sheet."
The findings also mentioned that as increasing global temperature melts the sea ice in the Arctic, the open water is exposed to greater solar radiation which only exacerbates the warming in the region. However, the effects of Arctic amplification remains highly debated among scientists. It may not provide an exact explanation of how the ongoing ice melts and temperature shifts affect the planet for the years to come but it does uncover a climatic phenomenon that should be a cause for concern for generations.
