AFP

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.

Rising sea levels — pushed up mainly by melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica — are set to redraw the map over centuries and could eventually swamp land currently home to hundreds of millions of people, depending on humanity’s efforts to halt warming. 

The Greenland ice sheet is currently the main factor in swelling the Earth’s oceans, according to NASA, with the Arctic region heating at a faster rate than the rest of the planet. 

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 percent of its volume, committing 27.4 centimetres to sea level rise. 

While the researchers were not able to give an exact timeframe, they said most of it could happen by 2100 — meaning that current modelled projections of sea level rise could be understating the risks this century. 

The “shocking” results are also a lowest estimate because they do not take future warming into account, said lead author Jason Box, of the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. 

“It’s a conservative lower bound. The climate has only to continue warming around Greenland for more commitment,” he told AFP. 

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. 

This should serve “as an ominous prognosis for Greenland’s trajectory through a 21st century of warming”, the authors said. 

In a landmark report on climate science last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the Greenland ice sheet would contribute up to 18cm to sea level rise by 2100 under the highest emissions scenario. 

Box, who was an author on that report, said his team’s latest research suggests those estimates could be “too low”. 

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.

– ‘Radical’ method –

The theory that researchers used was initially developed to explain changes in Alpine glaciers, said Box. 

This holds that if more snow piles up on top of a glacier, lower areas to expand. In this case the reduced snow is driving shrinking in lower parts of the glacier as it rebalances, he said. 

Box said the methods his team used were “radically different” from computer modelling, but could complement this work. 

Gerhard Krinner, another IPCC author specialising in ice sheet climate modelling and who was not involved in the study, said the findings broadly tallied with total levels of sea level rise seen in more complicated models, but questioned the arguments that this would largely happen this century. 

“The work really provides an estimate of the committed long-term (multi-century or even multi-millennial) response of the Greenland Ice Sheet, not an estimate of minimum loss over this century,” said Krinner, a senior scientist at the French research agency CNRS. 

The world has warmed an average of nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, unleashing a catalogue of impacts from heatwaves to more intense storms.  

Under the Paris climate deal, countries have agreed to limit warming to 2C. 

In their report on climate impacts this year, the IPCC said even if warming is stabilised at 2C to 2.5C, “coastlines will continue to reshape over millennia, affecting at least 25 megacities and drowning low-lying areas”, which were home to up to 1.3 billion people in 2010. 

The last of his people, a Brazilian indigenous man known only as “the man of the hole” has been found dead, decades after the rest of his uncontacted tribe were killed off by ranchers and illegal miners, officials said.

Having lived in complete isolation for 26 years, the man — whose real name was never known to the outside world — was found in a hammock in a hut in the Tanaru indigenous territory in Rondonia state on the border with Bolivia on August 23, Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) said in a statement.

Since losing everyone he knew, the man had refused all contact with the outside world and supported himself by hunting and raising crops. His nickname derived from his habit of digging deep holes inside the huts he built, possibly to trap animals in but also to hide inside.

He lived in an indigenous territory surrounded by vast cattle ranches and under constant threat from illegal miners and loggers in one of the most dangerous parts of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, according to Survival International.

Authorities did not comment on the cause of the man’s death, nor his age, which wasn’t known, but said “there were no signs of violence or struggle.”

They also found no evidence of the presence of anyone else in his home or around it.

“Everything indicates that the death was from natural causes,” said FUNAI, a government agency under the justice ministry that is tasked with handling indigenous affairs.

Local media reported that the man’s body had been covered in macaw feathers, prompting one expert to speculate that he had known he was about to die.

The man was believed to have been alone since the remaining members of his small tribe were killed in the mid-1990s by illegal loggers and miners seeking to exploit the tribal area.

Rights groups said that the majority of the tribe had been killed in the 1970s when ranchers moved into the area, cutting down the forest and attacking the inhabitants.

“With his death, the genocide of this indigenous people is complete,” said Fiona Watson, Survival’s director of investigation, who visited the Tanaru territory in 2004.

“It really was genocide: the deliberate elimination of an entire people by ranchers hungry for land and wealth,” she added.

According to the most recent government data, there are some 800,000 indigenous people belonging to more than 300 distinct groups living in Brazil, a country of 212 million.

More than half live in the Amazon and many of those are under threat from illegal exploitation of natural resources that they rely on for their survival.

According to FUNAI, there are 114 records of isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, although that number varies.

Under Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Amazon deforestation reached a record level in the first half of 2022.

The president, who is trailing in polls ahead of this year’s elections, has encouraged mining and farming activity in protected areas, sparking anger among environmentalists.

Pacing up and down a beach of fine white sand on the Black Sea coast, 63 year-old Ukrainian scientist Ivan Rusev breathes a sigh of relief: he did not find any dead dolphins today.

A few moments earlier he had rushed towards what he thought was a stranded dolphin. Mercifully it turned out only to be “tangled fishing gear”.

Rusev spoke to AFP from the Tuzly Estuaries National Nature Park, a protected area of 280 square kilometres (108 square miles) in the Bessarabia region of south-west Ukraine.

Rusev, whose weather-beaten face is shaded by a hat he brought during adventures in central Asia, is the scientific director of the park.

Now his job entails walking every morning along beaches bordered by anti-tank mines in search of the dolphins that have been washing up here since the beginning of the war.

“We only found three dolphins over our entire 44 kilometres (27 miles) coastline last year,” he tells AFP.

“This year, over the five kilometres (3 miles) that we can still access, we already found 35 of them.”

Much of the coastline has been off-limits to employees of the park since Ukrainian troops took up positions there to prevent any possible Russian sea assault.

This means Rusev and his team cannot say exactly how many dolphins have been stranded in the park or survey the full extent of the damage.

– Dangerous sonars – 

In any case, the death toll is “terrifying,” says Rusev, who has been keeping an online diary — now widely followed on Facebook — about the impact of the war on wildlife.

When dolphins started washing up on the coast in March, Rusev and his team had to get to work quickly to spot dead animals before the many jackals roaming the area got to them. 

“Then, we reached out to our colleagues in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania. Everyone witnessed the same thing: a huge number of dolphins have died since the beginning of the war,” Rusev said.

The Turkish Marine Research Foundation (TUDAV) warned in March of an “unusual increase” in dead dolphins washing ashore on the Black Sea coast.

Rusev estimates that 5,000 dolphins have been killed — about 2 percent of the total dolphin population in the Black Sea. 

The Black Sea was home to an estimated 2 million dolphins during the 20th century, but fishing and pollution contributed to their decline.

A survey found there were about 250,000 of dolphins left in 2020. 

There’s no doubt in Rusev’s mind: military sonars used by Russian warships are to blame for the current bloodbath.

The powerful sonars used by warships and submarines “interfere with dolphin’s hearing systems”, he explains.

“This destroys their inner ear, they become blind and cannot navigate or hunt,” and are more susceptible to lethal disease due to their weakened immune systems, according to Rusev.

The dolphin remains do not show any trace of fishing nets or wounds, which for Rusev is further evidence ruling out the possibility they died any other way.

– Trading blame –

Russia and Ukraine are trading blame even on the environmental toll of the war, so Rusev’s theory is disputed. 

Russian scientists who looked into the increase in dolphin mortality blamed morbillivirus, a common lethal disease for the species.

Rusev and his team took samples from dolphins that had recently been found and have sent them to Germany and Italy to settle the debate.

Usually Rusev sleeps in a cabin next to the entrance of the park.

Today, the carcass of a dead dolphin lies next to his cabin, in the lagoon’s stagnant waters.

Rusev covered it with a fishing net. That way, he explains, fish will eat the flesh, and he can give the remaining skeleton to a museum. 

The scientist, sometimes halting conversation to marvel at a white-tailed sea eagle or a flock of pelicans, is visibly worried. 

Military strikes have already hit the national park and burned 100 hectares of protected land.

“War is a terrifying thing,” he said. “It impacts the whole ecosystem, including species that won’t easily recover. 

“Nature’s balance won’t easily recover either.”