Greenland at its warmest in 1,000 years: study

Temperatures in parts of Greenland are warmer than they have been in 1,000 years, the co-author of a study that reconstructed conditions by drilling deep into the ice sheet told AFP today.

"This confirms the bad news that we know already unfortunately ... (It is) clear that we need to get this warming under control in order to stop the melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet", climate physics associate professor Bo Mollesoe Vinther of the University of Copenhagen told AFP.

By drilling into the ice sheet to retrieve samples of snow and ice from hundreds of years ago, scientists were able to reconstruct temperatures from north and central Greenland from the year 1000 AD to 2011.

Their results, published in the scientific journal Nature, show that the warming registered in the decade from 2001-2011 "exceeds the range of the pre-industrial temperature variability in the past millennium with virtual certainty".

During that decade, the temperature was "on average 1.5  degrees Celsius warmer than the 20th century", the study found.

The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is already leading to rising sea levels, threatening millions of people living along coasts that could find themselves underwater in the decades or centuries to come.

Greenland's ice sheet is currently the main factor in swelling the Earth's oceans, according to Nasa, with the Arctic region heating at a faster rate than the rest of the planet.