UCLA’s Laurence Smith trekked to Greenland to track the Arctic melt. His team’s fieldwork helps to measure the impact of climate change.
UCLA College professor Laurence Smith is no armchair geographer; he took an expedition to Greenland to track the Arctic melt. The fast-running, intensely blue streams looked like the world’s biggest waterslide park, Smith recalls. But their speed and temperature made them dangerous.
The expedition wasn’t there to admire the scenery: the Arctic melt is serious business. If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would raise the sea level enough to submerge the entire state of Florida, Smith estimates.
The world’s second-largest body of ice after the Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet originally covered 660,000 square miles. But it is now melting at a rapid rate due to climate change. Smith and his graduate student researchers are using field measurements in an attempt to verify current computer-model–based projections of the rise in sea level caused by the runoff.
Smith has garnered considerable attention for his research on the effects of climate change on the Arctic, including its role in the disappearance of lakes and the evolving potential for commercial trans-Arctic shipping through the region. He is also the author of The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future.
The NORCS, as Smith calls the northern rim countries, may actually stand to benefit from a warmer climate. But that doesn’t make Smith a fan of climate change: he is one of the scholars calling for an early warning system to help society better anticipate the often unforeseen and potentially calamitous impacts.
“The good news is that some threats … now seem unlikely to occur in the next few decades. The bad news is that other threats which have received much less attention could be devastating,” Smith says.
ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA BLOG STORY ABOUT PROF. SMITH’S RESEARCH