Iceland – Due to global warming, these ice caps have started melting rapidly, at a faster rate compared to the last 200 years.
The world is acknowledging the fact that there is a rise in sea levels, while the problem in Iceland is that of falling sea levels.
In the Höfn village, the sea lagoons are becoming shallower and harder to navigate. It is observed that the forces of the tides have decreased as compared to earlier.
This has filled up the channel with the sediments where fishing was done.
Þorvarður Árnason, director of the University of Iceland’s research center in Höfn, said,
“The big ships when they’re coming fully laden with capelin or herring, the keels of the ships are going to be quite close to the bottom. So, there is an increased danger that they will hit the bottom, which could lead to leaks in the hull, financial loss, or a shipwreck.”
Adding,
“The 60 or so men working on the ships, they are all local. The idea of a shipwreck is terrifying.”
Höfn – Iceland
The village is settled on the largest ice cap in Iceland. It is a fishing town with a population of over two thousand people in the southeast of Iceland.
Due to global warming, these ice caps have started melting rapidly, at a faster rate compared to the last 200 years.
With their disappearance, there is an increment in ground level. With this, water runs off into the ocean.
As glaciers have pushed the ground underneath, as glaciers melt, the pressure decreases and tries to regain its position.
With this, the GPS measurements show that the ground is rising by 1.7 centimeters every year.
Because of global warming, the Arctic is witnessing the worst temperature change in the world, while every year about 10 billion tonnes of ice is lost by Iceland, according to NASA.
For the dropping sea level, there is another reason is gravity.
This rapid melting is adding giant volumes of water to the ocean. This rise is uniform. The meeting places are also experiencing a drop in sea level.
Everything has its mass and gravity. The larger the object, the greater its gravity. So do the glaciers.
According to Thomas Frederikse, a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
“The ice sheet is so heavy that it pulls the ocean towards it due to gravity. But if the ice sheet melts away, this attraction starts to weaken and the water moves away.”
Adding, “The further away you are from the ice sheet, the more water you get.”
Ice melting accounts for about two-thirds of the world’s sea-level rise. As a result, the usage of fossil fuels and gases results in rising sea temperatures and expanding oceans as a result.
According to scientists, if the temperature rises by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, there would be an increment of 70 centimeters in the global sea level.
With the melting of glaciers, the impact on the global sea level is not uniform.
Since the start of the 20th century, there has been a rise in sea level of about 20 cm. The melting contributes more to mean sea level rise halfway around the globe, as in the Marshall Islands, than the water in Iceland.
Marshalls
The Marshalls are made up of five islands and a low-lying atoll. As a result, with the rise in sea levels in Iceland and Greenland, people have had to change their lifestyles. Here, the shoreline is decreasing.
The elevation of the Marshalls is 2 meters. An increase in sea level is causing flooding and waves washing over the barriers on the shoreline. Drinking water is also being affected.
The current scientific data shows that if the world stopped using fossil fuels today, the sea level would rise until 2050.
Source:
- CNN News
Edited by – Vanshika Sahu
Published by – Mohd Faizan
