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Greenland's current ice sheet is just a few hundred years

April 30, 2018 by Elizabeth Duran

Greenland's current ice sheet is just a few hundred years old, and scientists have not been able to determine the overall cause of Greenland's recent melting. To determine the cause, scientists used a technique known as a "mixture model" to analyze Greenland surface melt and precipitation records.

"We found that the warming trend on Greenland's surface has been driven by human influences, rather than by human-caused trends," said Dr. James E. O'Brien, a glaciologist at the University of Cambridge.

He and his colleagues used a mixture approach to analyze Greenland's surface melt and precipitation data. Instead of looking at the total amount of ice in the Greenland ice sheet, they looked at the amount of melt ice and precipitation over the past several centuries. Their study shows that while the observed melt and precipitation are actually similar, they are not identical. Rather, they are both in the same time period (between 2000 and 2015) and the extent of the melt melt and precipitation is substantially lower in Greenland on average compared to the rest of the Antarctic.

Efforts to understand how Greenland's surface melt and precipitation were caused have been plagued by a variety of problems for the past few decades. First, it is difficult to determine the precise number of times ice sheets have melted. Because the Greenland ice sheet is larger than any other ice sheet in the world, a large number is likely to melt during a particular year. For example, if the ice sheet is about to break apart within a decade, a large portion of it may melt over the next decade. In order to fully understand how these melt melt and precipitation events have been caused by human-caused trends, researchers needed to understand more about how the Greenland ice sheet is changing over time:

The first ice core was drilled a few hundred years ago.

The ice core was drilled a few hundred years ago. Then, the ice began to break apart.