According to a study published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, even if global warming stops, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet will lead to a significant rise in sea levels, an “alarming” and potentially underestimated forecast, writes AFP.

The study’s glaciologists found that current warming, regardless of any additional fossil fuel pollution, would result in the loss of at least 3.3 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet volume, or 27.4 centimeters of sea level rise.

The researchers, although they can’t put an exact time frame, say that most of this increase could happen by 2100. This means that current projections are underestimated and that these “alarming predictions” should be taken seriously.

These estimates are also a lower bound because they do not take into account future warming, explained lead author Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS).

“This is a conservative lower limit. If the climate continues to warm around Greenland, the effect will be greater,” he told AFP. If the extraordinary levels of melting recorded in 2012 are repeated every year, the water could rise up to 78 centimeters, submerging large areas of low-lying land and their inhabitants.

In its landmark 2021 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that under a worst-case greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet would cause sea levels to rise by 18 cm by 2100. Another important source of sea level rise is the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet.

For Jason Box, one of the authors of the report, his team’s latest research suggests that these estimates are “too low.”

He says that while climate change poses more immediate threats, such as food insecurity, accelerating sea-level rise will also be a problem.