Important results from NEEM Community
Some of the NEEM community members celebrating the drilling passed 2,5 k on July 19, 2010. Only 37,36 m from bedrock.
Very important results from the NEEM ice core drilling project in Greenland - a 14-nation research team - lead by professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, are published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, January 2013.
Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, leader of the 14-nation research team, NEEM, with a little part of the 2,540-metre long ice core drilled out of the Northwestern part of the Greenlandic ice sheet.
New research results from the NEEM ice core drilling project, lead by Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Centre for Ice and Climate, shows that the Earth’s climate during the last interglacial period , the Eem period 130.000 -115.000 years ago, was around 8 degrees warmer than today.
Until recently most researchers had thought that Greenland contributed at least half of the 6-8 metres of Eemian sea-level rise, but the NEEM core implies that Greenland’s ice sheet lost at most one-quarter of its volume, and contributed no more than 2 metres of sea-level rise.
Good news and bad news
"The good news is that the Greenlandic ice sheet is not as sensitive to global warming as earlier assumed. The bad news is that if Greenland’s ice sheet did only contribute with more than a few meters Antarctica must have been responsible for a significant part of the sea-level rise", says Dorthe Dahl-Jensen.
The climate graph shows the temperature from the previous warm interglacial period, the Eemian (left) throughout the entire ice age to present time. The blue colours indicate ice from a cold period, the red colour is ice from a warm period and yellow and green is from the climate period in between. The new results show that during the Eemian period 130,000 to 115,000 thousand years ago the climate in Greenland was around 8 degrees C warmer than today.
The top shows a graph of ice sheet surface temperature and altitude. At the beginning of the Eemian, 128,000 years ago, the ice sheet in northwest Greenland was 200 meters higher than today, but during the warm Eemian period the ice mass regressed, so 122,000 years before now the surface had sunk to a level of 130 meters below the current level. During the rest of the Eemian the ice sheet remained stable at the same level with an ice thickness of 2,400 meters.
READ:
Article in Nature >>
Greenland ice cores reveal warm climate of the past >>
About NEEM - North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling >>
By Lone Holm Hansen