Study Suggests Greenland's Ice Sheet Has Melted Beyond Return

Ohio State University scientists studied 234 glaciers in the Arctic territory for 34 years until 2018 and found that the ice in Greenland is likely to disappear regardless of how quickly we try to reduce emissions.

According to the research, the annual snowfall is no longer enough to replace the glaciers and ice that is lost in during the summer.

Michalea King, the lead author of the study and researcher at Ohio State University explained: "There's a lot of places, like in Florida especially, where one meter alone would cover a lot of existing land areas.

"And that's exacerbated when you get storms and hurricanes and things like that, that then cause extra surge on top of a higher baseline."

Co-researcher and glaciologist Ian Howat added that Greenland 'is going to be the canary in the coal mine, and the canary is already pretty much dead at this point'.

He went on: "We've passed the point of no return but there's obviously more to come.

"Rather than being a single tipping point in which we've gone from a happy ice sheet to a rapidly collapsing ice sheet, it's more of a staircase where we've fallen off the first step but there's many more steps to go down into the pit."

It's not just Greenland that is feeling the impact of climate change either. Two ice caps in the Canadian arctic have also disappeared with NASA imagery showing just that.

Mark Serreze, director of NSIDC, first set foot on the St. Patrick Bay ice caps in 1982 as a young graduate student. He said: "When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape. To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away."