Greenland’s thaw pushes the biodiversity crisis

Abstract

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to sustained global warming over the last decades1. This is already reshaping the distribution of biodiversity across the world and can lead to the occurrence of large-scale singular events, such as the melting of polar ice sheets2,3. The potential impacts of such a melting event on species persistence across taxonomic groups — in terms of magnitude and geographic extent — remain unexplored. Here we assess impacts on biodiversity of global warming and melting of Greenland's ice sheet on the distribution of 21,146 species of vascular plants and tetrapods across twelve megadiverse countries. We show that high global warming would lead to widespread reductions in species' geographic ranges (median range loss, 35–78%), which are magnified (median range loss, 95–99%) with the added contribution of Greenland's melting and its potentially large impact on oceanic circulation and regional climate changes. Our models project a decline in the geographical extent of species hotspots across countries (median reduction, 48–95%) and a substantial alteration of species composition in the near future (mean temporal dissimilarity, 0.26–0.89). These results imply that, in addition to global warming, the influence of Greenland's melting can lead to the collapse of biodiversity across the globe, providing an added domino in its cascading effects.

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“…También debe considerarse el efecto en los distintos ecosistemas, como fenómenos de ruptura que conllevan mayor incertidumbre. Predecir los efectos del cambio climático resulta en extremo complejo; es casi imposible saber hacia dónde mutará la circulación del océano Atlántico si se debilita la corriente del Golfo 27 (Caesar et al, 2021;Ureta et al, 2021) o a qué tasa se derretirán los hielos que cubren la superficie de Groenlandia (Sasgen et al, 2020;New York Times, 2020). La temperatura en la Antártida se ha venido incrementando a una tasa tres veces más alta que la observada en el resto del 24 Los nueve límites se refieren a: cambio climático, pérdida de biosfera, cambio en el sistema de tierra, uso de agua dulce, flujos bioquímicos, acidificación de los océanos, contaminación del aire, deterioro de la capa de ozono y entidades noveles.…”