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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 an estimated maximum of 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 are “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, it causes 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 to predict the impacts of sea level rise in the coming decades. 

He said while climate change was raising more immediate threats like food security, the accelerating pace of sea level rise will become a challenge. 

“It’s kind of decades in the future when it will just force its way onto the agenda because it will begin displacing people more and more and more,” he said.

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. 

But 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. 

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said on Monday he was en route to inspect Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, as Kyiv’s forces launched a counteroffensive to retake the occupied southern region of Kherson.

The coastal region of Kherson and its capital city of the same name have been contested by Russian troops since the war broke out six months ago.

“Today there was a powerful artillery attack on enemy positions in… the occupied Kherson region,” local government official Sergey Khlan told Ukraine’s Pryamyi TV channel.

“This is what we have been waiting for since the spring — it is the beginning of the de-occupation of Kherson region.”

Kherson city lies some 200 kilometres (125 miles) southwest of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — Europe’s largest atomic facility — which has also been occupied by Russian troops since early March. 

The plant was targeted over the weekend by fresh shelling, its operator said, with Moscow and Kyiv trading blame for attacks around the complex of six nuclear reactors in Energodar, a town on the banks of the Dnipro River.

Ukraine’s nuclear agency Energoatom has warned of the risk of a radiation leak.

Russian troops “continued to fire at Energodar and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant” on Sunday, injuring 10, among them four plant workers, it said in an update early on Monday.

As of 10:00 am (0700 GMT), the plant was operating “with the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards”. 

But Russia’s defence ministry accused Ukrainian troops of shelling near the plant on Sunday, claiming it had shot down a “Ukrainian strike drone” approaching a nuclear fuel and radioactive waste storage area. 

And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov urged the international community “to put pressure on the Ukrainian side so it stops endangering the European continent by shelling”.

Peskov said Russia saw the IAEA visit as “necessary” and had been “waiting for this mission for a long time”, insisting it would ensure its safety in the face of “constant” risks. 

– ‘Radiation blackmail’ –

Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky on Monday called for sanctions against Russia’s state nuclear energy agency Rosatom over the occupation of the plant.

“It’s not normal that there are no sanctions against Rosatom for its radiation blackmail at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant,” he said.

“The Russians are the only terrorists in the world that have managed to turn a nuclear plant into a battlefield.”

The UN’s nuclear watchdog has for months been asking to visit the site, warning of “the very real risk of a nuclear disaster”.

Writing on Twitter, Grossi on Monday said an IAEA support and assistance mission was “now on its way” with the team due to arrive “later this week”. 

The United Nations has called for an end to all military activity in the area surrounding the complex.

Ukraine initially feared an IAEA visit would legitimise the Russian occupation of the site before finally supporting the idea of a mission.

In its Monday update, Energoatom said the Russians had “increased pressure on the personnel of the plant to prevent them from disclosing (to the IAEA) evidence of the occupiers’ crimes at the plant and its use as a military base”.

The G7 industrial powers on Monday demanded free access for the IAEA team to “engage directly, and without interference, with the Ukrainian personnel responsible for operating these facilities”. 

And in Stockholm, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the team’s mission was “the hardest in the history of the IAEA, given the active combat activities undertaken by the Russian federation on the ground.”

Ukraine was the site of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe in 1986, when a reactor at the northern Chernobyl plant exploded and spewed radiation into the atmosphere.

Experts say any leak at Zaporizhzhia would more likely be on the scale of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Energoatom on Monday warned any leak would scatter radiation over swathes of southern Ukraine and southwestern regions of Russia. 

– Handing out iodine pills –

On the ground, at least two people were killed when Russian shells ploughed into the centre of the southern city of Mykolaiv, mayor Oleksandr Senkevych wrote on Telegram.

“For now, we know about two dead and five wounded,” he wrote, saying residential buildings had been hit.

With tensions high around the plant, Ukraine’s rescue services have been holding training sessions on managing the risk of nuclear accidents. 

Schools in Zaporizhzhia city began distributing iodine pills to reduce medical risk of radiation in the event of a disaster, with some 200 people turning up to collect them on Friday when distribution began, an AFP correspondent said.

“The tablet is taken in case of danger, when the alarm is raised,” said Elena Karpenko, a nurse at the Zaporizhzhia Children’s Hospital. 

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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.”

A third of Pakistan is under water as a result of flooding caused by record monsoon rains, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman said Monday, calling it a “crisis of unimaginable proportions”.

Officials say at least 33 million people — one in every seven Pakistanis — have been affected by the floods, which have killed 1,136 people since the monsoon began in June.

Vast parts of farmland in southern Sindh and western Balochistan provinces are now just landscapes of water, while in the north, roads and bridges have been washed away by raging mountain rivers.

“To see the devastation on the ground is really mind-boggling,” Rehman told AFP in an interview.

“When we send in water pumps, they say ‘Where do we pump the water?’ It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out.”

Rehman said “literally a third” of Pakistan was under water, describing it as akin to a dystopian movie.

– Appeal for help –

She also expected the death toll to rise as many areas in the north of the country, where dozens of rivers are still in full flood, remain cut off.

Rehman renewed the government’s appeal for international assistance, while also blaming major industrialised countries for their role in global warming.

Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is eighth on a list compiled by the NGO Germanwatch of countries deemed most vulnerable to extreme weather caused by climate change.

“It’s time for the big emitters to review their policies. We have crossed what is clearly a threshold,” she said.

“The multilateral forum pledges or ambitions voiced by other countries — the rich countries, that have gotten rich on the back of fossil fuels — they don’t really come through.”

Rehman said Pakistan’s economy, already in crisis, would be badly hit by the flooding.

“Sindh is half of Pakistan’s breadbasket and will not be able to grow anything at all next season,” she predicted.

“Not only will our exports be impacted, but our food security will take a hit.”

Rehman said a proper assessment of the damage caused by the flooding would take time.

“Right now, after everyone is actually rescued, we will be feeding and providing cooked meals and shelter,” she said.

“We need to also look for the spread of medical camps, because disease is always the next predator in such an environment.”

The International Monetary Fund board was meeting later Monday to decide whether to green-light the resumption of a $6 billion loan programme, but it is already clear it will take much more to repair and rebuild after this monsoon.

“We are in touch with our big donors… let’s hope they can come up with something that can really assist one of the most climate-impacted countries of the world in its time of need,” Rehman said.