Modern temperatures in central-north Greenland warmest in past millennium

The Greenland Ice Sheet has a central role in the global climate system owing to its size, radiative effects and freshwater storage, and as a potential tipping point(1). Weather stations show that the coastal regions are warming(2), but the imprint of global warming in the central part of the ice sh...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature
Main Authors: Hoerhold, M., Muench, T., Weissbach, S., Kipfstuhl, S., Freitag, J., Sasgen, I., Lohmann, G., Vinther, B., Laepple, T.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2023
Subjects:
ICE-SHEET
CLIMATE VARIABILITY
WATER ISOTOPES
STABLE-ISOTOPES
FIRN
PRECIPITATION
OXYGEN
MELT
RECONSTRUCTIONS
DENSIFICATION
Greenland
ice core
Ice Sheet
North Greenland
Online Access:https://curis.ku.dk/portal/da/publications/modern-temperatures-in-centralnorth-greenland-warmest-in-past-millennium(8eacd119-0c20-44c1-8508-10be098e03ad).html
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05517-z
https://curis.ku.dk/ws/files/346047850/s41586_022_05517_z.pdf
Description
Summary:The Greenland Ice Sheet has a central role in the global climate system owing to its size, radiative effects and freshwater storage, and as a potential tipping point(1). Weather stations show that the coastal regions are warming(2), but the imprint of global warming in the central part of the ice sheet is unclear, owing to missing long-term observations. Current ice-core-based temperature reconstructions(3-5) are ambiguous with respect to isolating global warming signatures from natural variability, because they are too noisy and do not include the most recent decades. By systematically redrilling ice cores, we created a high-quality reconstruction of central and north Greenland temperatures from ad 1000 until 2011. Here we show that the warming in the recent reconstructed decade exceeds the range of the pre-industrial temperature variability in the past millennium with virtual certainty (P < 0.001) and is on average 1.5 +/- 0.4 degrees Celsius (1 standard error) warmer than the twentieth century. Our findings suggest that these exceptional temperatures arise from the superposition of natural variability with a long-term warming trend, apparent since ad 1800. The disproportionate warming is accompanied by enhanced Greenland meltwater run-off, implying that anthropogenic influence has also arrived in central and north Greenland, which might further accelerate the overall Greenland mass loss.

Similar Items