“And if we keep on going with the carbon emissions as we do right now, then by 2100, Greenland will have contributed up to 50 centimeters to sea level rise and this will affect millions of people who live in coastal areas.”Weather stations along the edge of the Greenland ice sheet have detected that its coastal regions are warming, but scientists’ understanding of the effects of rising temperatures there had been limited due to the lack of long-term observations.“If you want to state something is global warming, you need to know what the natural variation was before humans actually interacted with the atmosphere,” she said.“For that, you have to go to the past – to the pre-industrial era – when humans have not been emitting [carbon dioxide] into the atmosphere.”During pre-industrial times, there were no weather stations in Greenland that gathered temperature data like today.In 2019, an unexpectedly hot spring and a July heat wave caused almost the entire ice sheet’s surface to begin melting, shedding roughly 532 billion tons of ice into the sea.The warm air then fueled an extreme rain event, dumping 7 billion tons of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool at Washington, DC’s National Mall nearly 250,000 times."