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In Greenland, the glaciers are melting. And they’re not just melting—they’re vanishing at an astonishing rate. Just this year, ice melts in the country contributed to an average global sea level rise of more than one millimeter. That may not seem like a lot, but after the hottest summer in Greenland’s record, about 440 billion tons of ice have melted off the country’s massive ice sheet. Over time, there’s enough ice in Greenland to raise sea levels by more than seven meters.
NASA’s OMG mission is ongoing, and Today’s weather and feature anchor Al Roker recently joined it in Kulusuk, Greenland, as part of a new reporting unit at NBC that will focus on telling the story of climate change. Roker says that Arctic regions serve as “the canary in the coal mine” for climate change, as readily visible changes there signify serious problems to come for the rest of the planet. Greenland’s melting glaciers mean the eventual disappearance of habitable land in low-level areas ranging from Bangladesh to Florida. “The ripple effects [from Arctic] areas result around the globe, including the United States,” Roker says.
This is the kind of research NBC’s new Climate Unit will continue to focus on. The unit will debut its work on Sunday, September 15 with an on-the-ground reporting series titled “Climate in Crisis” that will run through Friday, September 20 across NBC News, MSNBC, Telemundo, and NBC News Digital Sunday. While Roker’s trip to Greenland will highlight the many consequences of the country’s glacier melt, Lester Holt’s will travel to Alaska, his home as a child, to showcase what happens what a permafrost thaws does to cities.
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The new unit will focus on how climate change affects all different areas of society. “It’s not just, ‘Oh, there’s more severe weather,'” says Roker. For example, he explains, “There are 3,500 military facilities we have in this country and around the globe. Half of them are going to be susceptible to climate change.”
For Roker, this fact is among the most surprising he’s learned in his climate change research so far. “Climate security is the number one threat for Homeland Security. You think of the obvious stuff,” he says, “but it never dawned on me that that would be one of the sidebars.”
The more “obvious stuff” can currently be seen most dramatically in the proverbial coal mine of Greenland, where NASA has been finding water at tropical temperatures right at the base of glaciers. “Their initial findings are that the rate of ice melt could be double what they expected in the next several years, if this continues,” says Roker. “The effects that we were expecting to see in 50 or 60 years may be more like 20 or 30 years, or maybe even less. The rate at which things are picking up is very surprising to people, especially the scientists.”