Greenland is covered by an ice sheet that holds 217 times more water than Lake Superior, which is the third largest lake in the world. If all of Greenland’s ice melted, sea level would rise by about twenty-four feet. According to Paul Bierman, just under 10% of Earth’s population lives within thirty feet of sea level. His fascinating book When the Ice is Gone (2024) reveals how ice-core and sub-ice sediment analysis “revolutionized our understanding of climate changes over glacial-interglacial time scales.” It revealed that sometime in the last million years, Greenland’s ice melted without people or high Co2 concentrations to allow plants to grow on the tundra.
Bierman warns that if the ice vanished before, it can vanish again, especially as our planet is warming so quickly. It will take from hundreds of years to a few thousand years to melt all of Greenland’s ice sheet, but in the meantime the sea level will continue to rise, helped by the vanishing mountain glaciers and polar sea ice. Coastal cities such as Jakarta, Kolkata, Osaka, Tokyo, Hanoi, and Shanghai are at risk. If CO2 concentrations continue to increase, Bierman adds that Venice’s protective sea gate system could last from fifty to one hundred years. Miami might last to about 2100. The coast of Virginia and the Naval Station Norfolk, base of the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet, are being overtaken by rising water.
To stop global warming and preserve the ice sheets, the Earth must “rapidly decarbonize.” But even that is not enough, Bierman states. We need to lower the concentration of “atmospheric carbon dioxide” to cool our planet and stop the melt. We don’t have the technology to pull carbon out of the atmosphere yet, but neither did we have other technologies. Better soil management, tree planting and protecting forests will help reduce carbon concentrations, but they are subject to the changing climate. He says, “Greenland’s ice vanished before.” We need to “stop burning fossil carbon before the ice is gone again.”
Paul Bierman, a geologist, and professor of environmental science, has written a compelling and readable scientific study of Greenland’s climate history told through ice-cores. The book details the building of Camp Century, a military camp, deep under the Greenland ice sheet for US scientists and support staff, from June 1959 to summer 1966, to execute ice-core drilling and then the decades long process of analyzing the cores.
In more recent news, U.S. President Donald Trump has publicly stated that he wants to acquire Greenland, despite the fact that it is part of the sovereign territory of Denmark. Denmark says, no deal, they’re keeping Greenland. Former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said the U.S. is free to set up more bases on Greenland in keeping with a 1951 treaty and NATO considerations. Vice-President Vance, on a recent visit to Greenland, slammed Denmark for failing to prioritize the territories security. But Thorning-Schmidt said that the “Americans could do the same,” because the U.S. had 16 bases in Greenland in World War II, but let that number fall to one.
