On January 19, a paper published online in the international academic journal Nature reported that the recent temperature of the Greenland ice sheet is the highest in the past 1,000 years. The ice sheet temperature between 2001 and 2011 was an average of 1.5°C warmer than in the 20th century. Two days before the paper was published, a rare polar bear attack occurred in Alaska, USA. Phenomena suggest that the negative impacts of climate change may be closer to everyday life.
Greenland
Greenland's glaciers if they all melt
Global sea levels could rise by about 7 metres
Maria Holder, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute and lead author of the paper, believes that human-caused climate change is exacerbating the rise in temperatures in the Arctic, and that melting ice has had a considerable impact on the globe. "If we don't accelerate the reduction of carbon emissions, Greenland will cause sea level rise by 50 centimeters by 2100, which will affect millions of people along the coast." ”
In fact, the trend of global warming has been around since 1800, and extreme weather events are occurring more frequently in Greenland. Recent studies have shown that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. Many glaciologists believe that temperatures in the Greenland ice sheet are approaching a tipping point that could trigger catastrophic glacier melting. According to NASA, Greenland has enough ice that if it all melts, global sea levels could rise by about 7 meters.
In addition, new research published some time ago in the journal Nature found that global glacier melting will intensify, and the impact on sea level rise will exceed the estimates of existing scientific research projects. Using new satellite data to simulate different climate change scenarios, the researchers found that even if global climate goals were met, half of the glaciers could still disappear by the end of the century.
polar bear
Polar bears appear in remote towns in the United States
Attacked local residents and killed a mother and son
According to the Alaska police, on January 17, local time, a polar bear broke into a community in the state and chased and attacked several residents, resulting in the death of two people. A local resident shot and killed a polar bear after wounding him. Austin McDaniel, director of communications for the Alaska Department of Public Safety, said in a statement Wednesday that the dead were a 24-year-old woman and a 1-year-old boy, and that the two were mother-child.
The incident area is south of the polar bear habitat, and there are very few traces of polar bears, and the deaths caused by polar bear attacks on humans are very rare. The last such incident in Alaska was reported in 1990, when a hungry polar bear attacked and killed a man.
A study published in 2017 also found that globally, polar bears rarely attack humans. "From 1870 to 2014, we recorded 73 attacks on polar bears in the wild in five polar bear range countries (Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States), resulting in 20 deaths and 63 injuries." The study reads.
Some experts say that the melting of glaciers caused by climate change has changed the behavior of polar bears, making it more likely that humans will encounter them. The town of Churchill in northern Manitoba, Canada, is known as the "polar bear capital of the world," and residents have previously said in interviews that the frequency of encounters with polar bears has increased in recent years.
In recent decades, severely affected by climate change, many bear herds in the Arctic have been forced to suffer from starvation, and some even choose to go to nearby human settlements in search of food. A previous study found that most polar bears may struggle to survive in the Arctic by 2100.
Red Star News Reporter Wang Yalin Intern Reporter Liang Hong
Edited by Wang He Responsible Editor: Wei Kongming
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