Ice sheet collapse: The greatest unknown in climate science | Jon Gertner

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The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are remnants of the ice age. They're also the wild cards of climate science.

- The science of glaciology and ice sheets is quite new, as methods to measure melting glaciers were only realized with the advent of aviation and lasers.

- The world's sea levels are rising 3mm per year, and of that Greenland's ice sheet contributes 1mm – it is losing between 250 to 300 billion tons of ice per year. Three millimeters total is not much, but ice sheets don't always operate in a linear fashion.

- No human has ever witnessed an ice sheet collapse. It is also such a rare event that models cannot accurately predict what the effect will be. Can we halt global warming before we reach that tipping point?

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