Despite the sceptics, for whom the planet’s glaciers are not really shrinking all that much, and in any case not in a worrying way, new dramatic data are emerging, and this time they concern none other than Greenland, the largest Arctic land and the biggest island on Earth.
Its ice sheet is losing an average of 30 million tonnes of ice an hour – yes, you read that correctly, every hour. The cause, according to the scientists monitoring the phenomenon, is of course the climate crisis.
The figure is all the more striking when you consider that, compared with the forecasts of previous decades, the extent of the melting is 20% greater than was thought.
And if anyone were to reply that, all things considered, it doesn’t seem all that serious since there is still a lot of ice in Greenland, scientists warn us that all this fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic could soon lead to a genuine collapse of the ocean circulation system that regulates the climate of Europe and North America: the so-called AMOC (Atlantic meridional overturning circulation), a sort of invisible conveyor belt that sends the warm, light, salty waters of the Gulf Stream towards the North Atlantic and redistributes the colder, heavier polar waters southwards.
