{"page":"\u003clink rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"https://lessonplanet.com/assets/packs/css/resources-c03aa079.css\" /\u003e\n\u003clink rel=\"stylesheet\" href=\"https://lessonplanet.com/assets/packs/css/lp_boclips_stylesheets-517835be.css\" media=\"all\" /\u003e\n\u003cdiv data-title='Scientists warn accelerated glacier melts indicate sea levels could rise' data-url='/boclips/videos/5c54bde5d8eafeecae13783c' data-video-url='/boclips/videos/5c54bde5d8eafeecae13783c' id='bo_player_modal'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='boclips-resource-page modal-dialog panel-container'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='react-notifications-root'\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-header'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-type'\u003e\n\u003ci aria-hidden='true' class='fai fa-regular fa-circle-play'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\nVideo\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch1 class='rp-title' id='video-title'\u003e\nScientists warn accelerated glacier melts indicate sea levels could rise\n\u003c/h1\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-actions'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='mr-1'\u003e\n\u003ca class=\"btn btn-success\" data-posthog-event=\"Signup: LP Signup Activity\" data-posthog-location=\"body_link_boclips\" data-remote=\"true\" href=\"/subscription/new\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan\u003eGet Free Access\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan class=\"\"\u003e for 10 Days\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e!\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-body'\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-info'\u003e\n\u003cdiv aria-label='Hide resource details' class='rp-hide-info' role='button' tabindex='0'\u003e\u0026times;\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ci aria-label='Expand resource details' class='rp-expand-info fai fa-solid fa-up-right-and-down-left-from-center' role='button' tabindex='0'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\n\u003ci aria-label='Compress resource details' class='rp-compress-info fai fa-solid fa-down-left-and-up-right-to-center' role='button' tabindex='0'\u003e\u003c/i\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-rating'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='resource-pool'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='pool-label'\u003ePublisher:\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003cspan class='pool-name'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='text'\u003e\u003ca data-publisher-id=\"30356011\" href=\"/search?publisher_ids%5B%5D=30356011\"\u003eCurated Video\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class='rp-description'\u003e\n\u003cspan class='short-description'\u003e1. Wide aerial of broken ice in Sermilik Fjord 2. Wide aerial of Helheim Glacier 3. Aerial of where Glacier meets Sermilik Fjord 4. Close-up aerial of edge of Helheim Glacier 5. Professor of Climate Science Gordon Hamilton walking...\u003c/span\u003e\n\u003cspan class='full-description hide'\u003e1. Wide aerial of broken ice in Sermilik Fjord \u003cbr/\u003e2. Wide aerial of Helheim Glacier \u003cbr/\u003e3. Aerial of where Glacier meets Sermilik Fjord \u003cbr/\u003e4. Close-up aerial of edge of Helheim Glacier \u003cbr/\u003e5. Professor of Climate Science Gordon Hamilton walking towards GPS base station on hill overlooking Helheim Glacier \u003cbr/\u003e6. Mid of Hamilton checking GPS base station \u003cbr/\u003e7. Close-up of Hamilton's face \u003cbr/\u003e8. Interior of GPS base station \u003cbr/\u003e9. SOUNDBITE: (English) Gordon Hamilton, Professor of Climate Science, University of Maine\u003cbr/\u003e\"The Greenland ice sheet, along with the ice sheet in Antarctica, is one of the biggest potential contributors to rising sea-levels in the coming decades and centuries and one of the most amazing things that has happened in Greenland certainly in the last few years is that glaciers like this one here, Helheim glacier, have accelerated their flow speed and that's important because they are like conveyor belts that move mass out of the middle of the ice sheet and take it down to the Fjord behind us, the ocean behind us. When they get to the end they discharge ice-bergs into the ocean and that ice displaces sea water which causes sea level rise in the same way that melting ice and turning it into liquid water causes sea level rise.\" \u003cbr/\u003e10. Aerial of splits in Glacier\u003cbr/\u003e11 SOUNDBITE: (English) Gordon Hamilton, Professor of Climate Science, University of Maine\u003cbr/\u003e\"The Greenland ice sheet contains about 7 metres of sea level equivalent. In other words if you were to completely to get rid of the Greenland ice sheet and put all the ice that's frozen on the land's surface as liquid water into the ocean then sea levels around the world would be about 7 metres higher than they are today. Now scientists like me don't foresee a compete collapse of the ice sheet in certainly our life times and probably not for a few centuries so that 7 metre sea level rise scenario is not something we can expect any time soon but let's just say that if a small part of the ice sheet were to collapse and we got a rise of sea level by 1 metre that would have enormous implications for societies around the world, especially societies clustered near the coasts.\"\u003cbr/\u003e12. Wide aerial of Hamilton and colleague placing GPS recorder on Glacier \u003cbr/\u003e13. Pull out of Hamilton and colleague working on Glacier\u003cbr/\u003eAs five European foreign ministers prepare to meet on Thursday in Copenhagen, the city that will host the United Nations climate summit in December, scientists in Greenland are warning how accelerated glacier melts suggest sea levels could rise across the world, threatening millions who live in coastal cities.\u003cbr/\u003eThe evidence makes compelling reading for nations due meet in Copenhagen to draw up a pact that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which bounds 37 industrial countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 per cent of 1990 levels by 2012.\u003cbr/\u003eOn Thursday, Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller will be joined by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Finland's Alexander Stubb to stress the importance of reaching a deal in December. \u003cbr/\u003eScientists have reported that the Helheim Glacier, suddenly and without warning, has begun accelerating, spitting icebergs ever faster into the ocean off southeastern Greenland.\u003cbr/\u003eIn just two years, a blink of an eye in a glacier's life-span, it doubled its speed and retreated several miles (kilometers) up a rift in the coastal mountains.\u003cbr/\u003eWhen Helheim Glacier's speedup was mimicked by glaciers across Greenland, the alarm bells rang and experts feared the Island's vast ice sheet, a frozen water reservoir equivalent to 20 feet (7 metres) of sea level rise, was in danger of collapse.\u003cbr/\u003eHalf a decade later, there's a little bit of good news and a lot of uncertainty.\u003cbr/\u003e\"It does seem that the very rapid speeds were only sustained for a short period of time (1-2 years), although none of these glaciers have returned to the 'normal' flow speeds yet,\" says Gordon Hamilton, a glaciologist from the University of Maine, who's clocked Helheim's rapid advance on site with GPS receivers since 2005.\u003cbr/\u003eUnderstanding why Greenland's glaciers accelerated so abruptly in the first half of the decade, and whether they are now slowing down, is crucial to the larger question of how fast sea levels will rise as the planet warms.\u003cbr/\u003eThe behaviour of the ice sheet on Greenland and the much bigger ones on Antarctica was so poorly mapped when the last report by the UN expert panel on climate change went to print that it was left out of its estimates on sea level rise.\u003cbr/\u003eThe picture of what happened in Greenland is just starting to come together, but scientists are still in the dark about how the underlying causes were set in motion, how much was owed to natural variances and how much to man's tinkering with the global climate system.\u003cbr/\u003e\"This is like medical science in the 15th century,\" says David Holland, Director of the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science at New York University. \"It's going to take a while to find out what's going on with the patient here.\"\u003cbr/\u003eThe explanation is that the patient, Greenland's ice sheet, contracted its illness not from warmer air, but a warmer ocean.\u003cbr/\u003eScientists earlier believed that the biggest factor for the faster flow speeds was meltwater seeping down to the base of the glaciers, lubricating the bedrock. They're now shifting attention to ocean currents believed to have sent pulses of warmer water from southern latitudes to Greenland's glacial fjords.\u003cbr/\u003eA team led by Fiamma Stranneo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, made a similar discovery last month with probes plunged into the chilly depths of Sermilik fjord, where Helheim Glacier ends.\u003cbr/\u003eCoinciding with the shrinking of sea ice on the North Pole and the thawing of the Arctic permafrost, the discovery of Greenland's runaway glaciers raised a sense of urgency among scientists studying the impact of climate change on the frozen north.\u003cbr/\u003eFaster glacier flows are believed to have accounted for about 50 per cent of the mass loss observed from Greenland's ice sheet in recent years, with surface melting accounting for the other half.\u003cbr/\u003eThe outlet glaciers carry mass from the inland ice to the ocean, so if they chuck out more ice than is accumulated by snowfall in the interior, the ice sheet shrinks. \u003cbr/\u003eIn the process sea levels rise, because the towering icebergs sent adrift in the Atlantic Ocean as the glaciers calve displace water like an ice cube dropped into a drink.\u003cbr/\u003eThe 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects a sea level rise of about 7-24 inches (20-60 centimetres) this century. Adding the potential impact of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, many scientists have estimated the rise will be double, with dire consequences for low-lying areas from Florida to Bangladesh.\u003cbr/\u003e\"Now scientists like me don't foresee a compete collapse of the ice sheet in certainly our life times and probably not for a few centuries so that 7 metre sea level rise scenario is not something we can expect any time soon but let's just say that if a small part of the ice sheet were to collapse and we got a rise of sea level by 1 metre that would have enormous implications for societies around the world, especially societies clustered around the coast,\" said Hamilton.\u003cbr/\u003eHis latest measurements indicate that Helheim is flowing at 6.5 miles per year (10.5 kilometres per year), slightly down from its peak in 2005 but still 50 per cent faster than its normal pace.\u003cbr/\u003eOther researchers say some, but not all, of Greenland's glaciers have showed similar slowdowns in recent years, suggesting that a sudden, dramatic increase in flow speeds may not be such a cataclysmic and irregular phenomenon after all.\u003cbr/\u003eStill, the flows remain fast enough to yield a net loss of mass from the ice sheet. And if the world continues to warm, sudden spurts of glacial acceleration may become more frequent, draining the inland ice until it, eventually, collapses.\u003cbr/\u003eNo one can say with certainty whether that will take 100 years, or 1,000.\u003cbr/\u003e\"It's a little embarrassing to know so little,\" says Ian Howat, a glaciologist based at Ohio State University. \"We won't know it's going until it's gone. 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