What if GREENLAND Melted?

one of my most popular videos is one I made about a year ago talking about what would happen if all of the ice on Antarctica melted but besides Antarctica there was one other major land mass on earth covered nearly entirely by glaciers and that is Greenland and I don't know why it took me so long to think about but what if we did the same here what if Greenland melted as it stands now Greenland is the largest island on earth covering an area of 2.1 million square kilometers of that 1.7 million square kilometers are covered in ice sheets amounting to 81% of the land being smothered beneath ice which is an average of 2,000 meters deep and can reach up to 3 kilometers at its deepest that totals to around 2.8 5 million cubic kilometers of ice sitting atop this island and amounts to 6.7% of all the fresh water on our planet for some comparison Antarctica's ice sheets contain roughly 26 point five million cubic kilometers or about nine times more ice and accounts for 62 percent of all of our freshwater which means that while all of Antarctica melting could raise sea levels of 60 metres a melting of only Greenland would call sea levels to rise by an estimated 7.2 meters but because Greenland has less ice that also means it would take a lot less warming to actually fully melt it's estimated that only a 2 to 3 degrees Celsius rise in temperature could cause all of the ice to eventually melt from the land and it's thought that our climate has already exceeded a tipping point for many of Greenland's glaciers and will continue to melt regardless of what we do now what this results in is a NASA report showing exceedingly high melt rates of around 220 cubic kilometers of ice per year but if we take the total volume of ice in Greenland and divide it by the current melt rate we end up with a total melt time of nearly 13,000 years or what most people would call a pretty long time however today's melt rates aren't going to be tomorrow's melt rates and there are a number of factors which in the future will increase the rate of ice loss first if temperatures continue to rise so will the rate of melt that one's an easy one then as ice melts particles of dust and soot built up on the surface of the ice and make the glaciers look really dirty like this being an eyesore as the surface of the glacier becomes darker it absorbs more of the sun's energy as heat further increasing the rate of melting across the island this process is a fairly quick one - taking only a matter of years to become noticeable across the entire island from pictures like these we can see that in just 12 years the albedo or how much light is reflected off the surface of Greenland has already noticeably decreased showing that surface darkening is occurring across nearly the entire ice sheet as it begins to melt that being said there is still a lot of ice to melt and even in the worst case scenario there will still be ice on Greenland for another few thousand years but if you did wait around you'd be able to observe a very interesting landmass take form so here's the shape of Greenland now but if we look through the ice to the bedrock underneath we can see that a lot of Greenland isn't actually well land and we'll actually find a massive lake in the interior of the island this lake would measure around 250,000 square kilometers for comparison the Caspian Sea yes the world's largest lake is about 1.5 times that size while the next biggest lake Lake Superior would be about a third the size of this new lake which would make this the second largest lake in the world this great lake is part of what's called Greenland's Grand Canyon real creative this hidden Canyon runs for over 750 kilometres making it the longest anywhere on earth for some comparison the Grand Canyon in the United States is only 446 kilometres long unfortunately the entirety of this canyon would remain underwater and never fully explored however this is just the bedrock underneath Greenland and if all the ice really were removed from Greenland the like I mentioned before sea levels would rise as a result which means even less of this land would be above water if we account for the rise in sea level that would be necessary for all the ice to you know not be there anymore we can see these areas in red would become flooded too now this isn't actually a whole lot more land however even with this little amount lost something important is changed here where there was once a massive hollow island with a lake inside of it now there are three major islands encircling in inland sea as well as a number of lesser islands an island class the biggest island to come out of this would be roughly 1 million square kilometers which would mean Greenland or at least this portion of Greenland would remain the largest island in the world as the next biggest New Guinea is only 780 thousand square kilometers the second largest island would then be around 320 thousand square kilometers which would make it the seventh biggest island on earth right between Honshu mainland Japan and Sumatra in Indonesia then lastly the third main island would be around 230,000 square kilometers becoming the eighth biggest island being just barely bigger than Honshu again mainland of Japan together these islands would add up to roughly 1.6 million square kilometers which means that 74% of Greenland would remain above sea level or in other words more than 1/4 of Greenland's land area would be lost if it were to melt so the next question people might want to ask is what would the land here look like and well that's pretty easy to say actually because there's a number of very similar islands right next door in Canada these islands would fall under the term Arctic Archipelago were glaciated to a comparable degree to Greenland that is to say very glaciated up until when the most recent ice age was coming to a close despite this being around 12,000 years ago these islands for the most part have remained barren as they're freezing average temperatures will warm enough to prevent the formation of massive ice sheets is still too cold to foster high levels of organic productivity or diversity overall these islands are the closest real-world comparison I can make to a melted Greenland and shows that what remains of Greenland would be a barren and rocky landscape however there is evidence that some soil from Greenland's long distant past remains buried beneath the ice and the melting waters might deposit a layer of captured dust and soot which might help some types of life start to reclaim the frozen lands now Greenland does have one forest today in the kinwa Valley in the extreme southern end of the island and it's possible that with an increase in temperature and of removal of the ice along with a generous deposition of soil to the Greenlandic bedrock this forest might be able to expand further north while it's uncertain how far trees could make it you know because we don't know how much the earth's temperature is going to change there are currently surviving as far north on Greenland as the Congo Lucia cured so it's reasonable to think that without ice trees in a warmer future could make it at least to this point but in the end most of the land revealed by this melting would remain inhospitable for long-term human habitation however inhospitable doesn't mean unproductive and although large-scale commercial agriculture would be impossible like any landmass hidden under miles of ice for so long there is expected to be a large amount of Mineral Resources which have gone completely untapped the countries of Europe have already started looking into Greenland as a potential future source of raw materials and in particular of rare earth metals though without knowing the future prices of any of these resources it's tough to say which specific ones would be profitable to extract from Greenland in the distant future but there is perhaps one limited resource that we do know a melted Greenland would have available dry land because of this I can see Greenland's greatest resource in the event of its own melting being its potential salvation for climate refugees specifically in the event of sea level rise of certain low-lying countries of nearby Europe could find it easier to move to unsettled lands rather than push their way into an already densely populated Europe and while their new home might be far less comfortable than their old one there's at least one thing they'd never have to worry about again having fresh water I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did might I suggest checking out the video I made about a year ago about if Antarctica melted - I'd like to of course thank my patreon patrons who are scrolling by right now for helping make this video possible if you'd like to help me make more videos check out my patreon and you could give yourself up here at the end of my video other than that I'm actually leaving for Europe pretty soon so I don't know when I'll be back with another video though I will be trying to make videos about Europe while I'm there so you should still subscribe if you have it already Thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 411,767

Rating: 4.8755112 out of 5

Keywords: education, geography, science, atlaspro, greenland, iceland, arctic, circle, melt, sea, level, change, antarctica, russia, norway, canada, archipelago, climate, global, warming

Id: o7MCS4Z5EOc

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/izumi3682]

First of all the vast majority of humans don't know the true size of Greenland. They see Greenland on the world maps in a Mercator projection wherein Greenland appears roughly the same size as South America. Greenland is not much larger than Texas and Alaska put together. It is a pretty good sized island granted, but nothing, nowhere near the land area of South America.

Secondly, I looked it up. If all the ice on Earth melted, the sea level would rise 248 feet. That's a pretty noticeable altering of the world shorelines, but in the greater scheme of things not that massive of a physical change. The truth is that by the year 2100 the sea level could potentially rise about 5 feet. Certainly enough to cause inundation of most major cities on the coasts, but that is yet 81 years from today. That is nearly 3 generations of humans. I think we can figure things out in that time. That is if climate change is even an issue by that point. I see other far and away more salient and massive changes coming long before climate change becomes too much more of an issue.

I wrote about it here if you are interested. I cover all aspects of the future, to include climate change and the challenges we face.

https://www.reddit.com/user/izumi3682/comments/8cy6o5/izumi3682_and_the_world_of_tomorrow/