Greenland's ice loss up six-fold

Greenland glacier ice loss.  Photo by Eril de Jong.  Source: ScienceAlert

From ScienceAlert:

Greenland, home to the Earth's second largest ice sheet, has lost ice at an accelerating pace in the past several decades – a nearly sixfold increase that could contribute to future sea level rise, according to a new study based on nearly a half century of data.

The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, estimate that Greenland's glaciers went from dumping only about 51 billion tons of ice [per year] into the ocean between 1980 to 1990, to losing 286 billion tons [per year] between 2010 and 2018. [From 1972 to 1980, Greenland gained 47 gigatons of ice per year]

The result is that out of nearly 14 millimeters of sea level rise in total caused by Greenland since 1972, half of it has occurred in just the last 8 years, researchers found.

And the losses are likely to get worse. The regions with the biggest potential ice loss – the frigid far northwest and northeast of the island, which sit up against the Arctic ocean – have not changed as quickly as other parts of Greenland.

Should they begin to melt and lose chunks of ice more rapidly, then Greenland's overall ice loss – and contribution to sea level rise – could grow even more.

Eric Rignot, an Earth-systems scientist for the University of California at Irvine and NASA who was one of the study's authors, said in an email Monday that the study places the recent mass losses in Greenland in a longer-term context.

"The 1980s marked the transition time when the Earth's climate started to drift significantly from its natural variability as a result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases," Rignot said.

[Read more here]

Remember, temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as average global temperatures.