Greenland is warmer than it has been in a thousand years

Greenland ice cores have not yet shown any clear signs of global warming in the northern part of the island. Ice core samples drilled in 2011 show a significant increase in temperature over the past 15 years, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

– We still see warming between the 1990s and 2011, says lead author of the study Maria Horhold of Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute.

– We now have a clear sign of global warming, you say.

It takes several years to analyze the data from ice cores. Horhold has new ice cores from 2019, but they haven’t been fully analysed. She expects the temperature to continue to rise, with Greenland’s ice sheet and glaciers melting at a faster rate recently.

Ice core samples drilled from the thick ice sheet are used to make a chart of alternative temperatures for Greenland from the year 1000 to 2011. It shows that temperatures fell slowly for the first eight hundred years, then rose and fell slightly but slowly got warmer until a sharp, sudden rise from the 1990s onwards.

The rise after 1995 was much greater than it was in the pre-industrial times before the mid-1990s, and according to Horold, the possibility is “almost zero” that it has to do with something other than human-caused climate change.