- Italy targets climate activists in 'anti-Gandhi' demo clampdown
- South Korean cult-horror series 'Hellbound' returns at BIFF
- Nepalis fear more floods as climate change melts glaciers
- Honduras arrests environmentalist's alleged murderer
- Padres pitcher Musgrove needs elbow surgery
- Supreme Court lets stand rules to curb mercury, methane emissions
- Boston beat Denver in NBA exhibition season opener, but Jokic says omens are good
- Chagos diaspora angry at lack of input on islands' fate
- Biden says 'not confident' of peaceful US election
- US trade chief defends tariff hikes when paired with investment
- Lukaku stars as Napoli beat Como to hold Serie A top spot
- Ohtani set for MLB playoff debut as Dodgers face Padres
- Pogba's drug ban cut to 18 months from four years
- Devine leads New Zealand to big win over India in Women's T20 World Cup
- Bosnia floods kill 16 people
- EU court blocks French ban on vegetable 'steak' labelling
- Prosecutors seek dismissal of rape charges against French rugby players
- Meta AI turns pictures into videos with sound
- Bolivia's Morales says claims he raped a minor are a 'lie'
- MLB Reds hire two-time champion Francona as manager
- Daniel Maldini receives first Italy call-up for Nations League
- US dockworkers return to ports after three-day strike
- Ancelotti points finger at Madrid's 'lack of intensity'
- Haiti reeling after 70 killed in gang attack
- Five Czech kids in hospital over TikTok 'piercing challenge'
- What happens next in Iran-Israel conflict?
- Country star Garth Brooks denies rape accusations
- Stubbs hits maiden century as South Africa make 343-4 against Ireland
- DR Congo to begin mpox vaccination campaign Saturday in east
- Odegaard injury has forced Arsenal to be 'different', says Arteta
- Ratcliffe refuses to guarantee Ten Hag's Man Utd future
- Meta must limit data use for targeted ads: EU court
- Mauritius to hold legislative election on November 10
- Britain qualify for America's Cup final after 60-year wait
- IMF asks Sri Lanka to protect hard-won gains
- Morata returns to Spain Nations League squad after injury
- Irish regulator to probe Ryanair use of facial recognition
- Public allowed to see video evidence in France mass rape trial
- US hiring soars past expectations in sign of resilient market
- Under-fire Ten Hag 'together' with Man Utd hierarchy
- Guardiola talks of Man City love affair as financial hearing rumbles on
- De Bruyne out of Belgium Nations League squad
- Japanese trainer Yahagi hopes Shin Emperor achieves 50-year-old Arc dream
- UK's Starmer hails 'landmark' carbon capture funding
- As EU targets Chinese cars, European rivals sputter
- Bosnia floods kill 14 people
- Tennis world number one Swiatek splits with coach Wiktorowski
- Liverpool share responsibility for Nunez goal drought, says Slot
- Top EU court finds against FIFA in key transfer market ruling
- Top seed Sabalenka stunned by Muchova in Beijing last eight
Greenland already locked in to major sea level rise: study
Even without any future global warming, Greenland's melting ice sheet will cause major sea level rise with potentially "ominous" implications over this century as temperatures continue to rise, according to a study published Monday.
Rising sea levels -- pushed up mainly by melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica -- are set to redraw the map over centuries and could eventually swamp land currently home to hundreds of millions of people, depending on humanity's efforts to halt warming.
The Greenland ice sheet is currently the main factor in swelling the Earth's oceans, according to NASA, with the Arctic region heating at a faster rate than the rest of the planet.
In the new study, published in Nature Climate Change, glaciologists found that regardless of any future fossil fuel pollution, warming to date will cause the Greenland ice sheet to shed 3.3 percent of its volume, committing 27.4 centimetres to sea level rise.
While the researchers were not able to give an exact timeframe, they said most of it could happen by 2100 -- meaning that current modelled projections of sea level rise could be understating the risks this century.
The "shocking" results are also a lowest estimate because they do not take future warming into account, said lead author Jason Box, of the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
"It's a conservative lower bound. The climate has only to continue warming around Greenland for more commitment," he told AFP.
If the high levels of melting seen in 2012 became an annual occurrence, the study estimated sea-level rise could be around 78 cm, enough to swamp vast swathes of low-lying coastlines and supercharge floods and storm surges.
This should serve "as an ominous prognosis for Greenland's trajectory through a 21st century of warming", the authors said.
In a landmark report on climate science last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the Greenland ice sheet would contribute an estimated maximum of 18cm to sea level rise by 2100 under the highest emissions scenario.
Box, who was an author on that report, said his team's latest research suggests those estimates are "too low".
Instead of using computer models, Box and colleagues used two decades of measurements and observational data to predict how the Greenland ice sheet will adjust to the warming already experienced.
Upper areas of the ice sheet adds mass through snowfall every year, but since the 1980s the territory has been running an ice "budget deficit", which sees it lose more ice than it gains through surface melting and other processes.
- 'Radical' method -
The theory that researchers used was initially developed to explain changes in Alpine glaciers, said Box.
This holds that if more snow piles up on top of a glacier, it causes lower areas to expand. In this case the reduced snow is driving shrinking in lower parts of the glacier as it rebalances, he said.
Box said the methods his team used were "radically different" from computer modelling, but could complement this work to predict the impacts of sea level rise in the coming decades.
He said while climate change was raising more immediate threats like food security, the accelerating pace of sea level rise will become a challenge.
"It's kind of decades in the future when it will just force its way onto the agenda because it will begin displacing people more and more and more," he said.
The world has warmed an average of nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, unleashing a catalogue of impacts from heatwaves to more intense storms.
Under the Paris climate deal, countries have agreed to limit warming to 2C.
But in their report on climate impacts this year, the IPCC said even if warming is stabilised at 2C to 2.5C, "coastlines will continue to reshape over millennia, affecting at least 25 megacities and drowning low-lying areas", which were home to up to 1.3 billion people in 2010.
M.Gameiro--PC