Greenland ice melting 7 times faster than in 1993

A new study in the journal Nature finds Greenland is melting much faster than it was in the 1990s.

Measurements from a suite of 26 satellites show the rate of ice loss in Greenland is now about seven times the rate in the early 1990s.

Greenland’s ice sheets melted 33 billion tons of water a year in 1993. In the last decade, the average skyrocketed to 254 billion tons of melt on average. That’s a seven-fold increase. Recent meltwater rates are now at the upper range of IPCC predictions.

Even small rises in sea level are important because the gradual land elevation increases in many coastal areas means water pushes much further inland during storm events.

Here are some pertinent clips for the study in the journal Nature.

Here we compare and combine 26 individual satellite measurements of changes in the ice sheet’s volume, flow and gravitational potential to produce a reconciled estimate of its mass balance. Although the ice sheet was close to a state of balance in the 1990s, annual losses have risen since then, peaking at 335 ± 62 billion tonnes per year in 2011. In all, Greenland lost 3,800 ± 339 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2018, causing the mean sea level to rise by 10.6 ± 0.9 millimetres.

Cumulative ice losses from Greenland as a whole have been close to the IPCC’s predicted rates for their high-end climate warming scenario17, which forecast an additional 50 to 120 millimetres of global sea-level rise by 2100 when compared to their central estimate.

The story is getting international attention today. Here’s the write-up in the Guardian.

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer.

Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to data.

That means sea level rises are likely to reach 67cm by 2100, about 7cm more than the IPCC’s main prediction. Such a rate of rise will put 400 million people at risk of flooding every year, instead of the 360 million predicted by the IPCC, by the end of the century.

And here’s the Washington Post version.