The behaviour of ice sheets in climate change

The state of the world’s ice sheets provides a clear indication of the way the global climate is changing, and their continued depletion is a cause of correspondingly widespread concern. We spoke to Gilles Ramstein of the NICE project about his initiative’s work in this complex, rapidly evolving area.

 While it is widely agreed that the Earth’s average temperature is rising, debate continues over the precise cause and likely effects of this wider trend, with the potential for sea level change an area of particular contention. “We don’t know how much sea-level will rise by if the ice sheets begin to melt. This is very important, because rising sea-levels could have a major impact on human life,” says Gilles Ramstein, coordinator of the NICE (Network for Ice-Sheet and Climate Evolution) project, a research network training young students on issues relating to the global climate and how it is formed. “Until now it has been quite easy to predict sea levels, because their rise was primarily due to the thermal expansion of water when it was warm, and this accounted for just a few centimetres of change,” he continues. “But if you get the melting, or beginning of melting, of an ice sheet, then it could lead to changes on a much larger scale, between 1 and 60 metres.”

With approximately 80 per cent of the global population living at sea level, the implications of these kinds of changes are severe: however, action will only be effective if it is built on solid scientific foundations. “We use the recently acquired satellite data, which is only 10-20 years old, meaning we can drive information on the mass-balance of the ice-sheets from satellite data,” he explains. “For the first time in the earth’s history we are getting this type of data, which 30 years ago was completely inconceivable – it was not part of scientists’ thinking.”

He predicts: “I think that in this field there is still room for further improvement. This is because it’s really poorly constrained, the polar region is something that demands further research in order to get absolute data, research we are keen to undertake.”

Contact Gilles Ramstein, Head of Climate Group at LSCE and Project Coordinator for NICE (Network for Ice Sheet and Climate), at Gilles.Ramstein@lsce.ipsl.fr 

Published: Monday, 9th November 2009

Comment on this article

Comments

No comments for this article, be the first to comment