PARIS - 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 .
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 per cent of its volume, committing 27.4 centimetres to sea level rise. 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.
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.
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