Word: greenlanders
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From 30,000 ft. up, flying over the heart of the ice cap, you can't imagine it would ever be possible to lose Greenland. The only flaws in the sheer, marble-colored landscape are the black shadows cast by the scattered clouds above. But as our plane heads west toward the old American air base at Kangerlussuaq, puddles of blue glacial melt begin to appear - vast, unblinking eyes that reflect the sky back up. Then the whiteness is suddenly ruptured and the ice wrinkles and thins, revealing slashes of rock beneath the 2.9 million cubic...
...Greenland with a team of scientists, Danish officials (Greenland is a loosely governed Danish territory) and other journalists to visit a research project that may help answer one of the most important questions in climate science today: Will global warming melt the Greenland ice sheet? The massive ice sheet that covers all but the rocky coasts of Greenland is a relic of the last Ice Age. If it were to melt, it would release enough water to raise global sea levels by some 7 m - and that would spell the end for major coastal cities like New York City...
...best ways to try to figure out what will happen in the future is to ascertain what happened in the past. That's why we're in Greenland. Our team will be visiting the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, an international research team that has staked out a corner of the island's ice sheet and will, as the name suggests, drill. The ice in central Greenland is nearly 3 km thick, and as you drill down to the bottom, you can read the climatic history of the island as if you were counting tree rings going back...
Such experiments have been done in Greenland and Antarctica for decades, with ice cores that can track climatic history up to 800,000 years ago, and they've helped form the bulk of our knowledge about past climate change. But the timeline is patchy, especially in Greenland, where we haven't been able to get a reliable ice core dating from 115,000 to 130,000 years ago. That's the Eemian period, and during those years the earth was some 5?C warmer than it is today. The NEEM scientists, whose ice cores should track back to that period...
...degress fahrenheit—a steep increase considering that during the last ice age the globe was only 9 degress fahrenheit to 15 degress fahrenheit cooler than today. Global warming has already caused sea levels to rise between four and eight inches, and experts predict that if the Greenland ice sheet melted, it would submerge significant parts of many coastal cities around the world , including nearby Boston...