Greenland Ice Sheet Melting Faster and Raising Sea Levels Worldwide

The Greenland ice sheet is melting and losing mass at an accelerating rate, and has been doing so since the late 1990s, according to a new study reported in the journal Science and funded by the National Environment Research Council. Scientists who conducted used two different methods–satellite observations and a state-of-the-art regional atmospheric model–to independently confirm the results.

The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause sea levels around the world to rise 7 meters (approximately 23 feet) if all the ice melts. Since 2000, the Greenland ice sheet has lost enough mass to cause an average global sea level increase of about half a millimeter per year–about 5 millimeters total over the past decade.

The scientists attributed the acceleration to a number of causes, including increased melting on the surface of the ice sheet and a higher number of icebergs being produced (and sheared off from the main ice sheet) by Greenland’s “fast-flowing outlet glaciers.” Warmer-than-usual summers in 2006-2008 also helped to accelerate melting and mass loss on the Greenland ice sheet.

Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol, one of the authors of the report, said in a statement: “It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future. We have produced agreement between two totally independent estimates, giving us a lot of confidence in the numbers and our inferences about the processes.”

A global sea level rise of 5 millimeters over the course of a decade may not seem like much, but consider that in the context of three factors:

1. We’re talking about adding 5 millimeters to the level of the oceans worldwide, which cover roughly 70 percent of the planet’s surface, so that figure actually represents a huge amount of water.

2. The 5 millimeter number represents only the sea level increase that can be attributed to water from the Greenland ice sheet since 2000; it doesn’t take into account water from other sources or the overall sea level increase for the period.
3. Scientists found that the rate at which the Greenland ice sheet is melting and losing mass is accelerating, which means the ice is expected to melt even faster in the years ahead.

Along with threatening island and coastal communities worldwide, rising sea levels also push salt water into rivers and streams, damaging freshwater aquatic species and reducing the amount of fresh water available for drinking and agriculture. And the fresh water released by melting ice changes the acidity and chemical balance of the oceans, creating hazards for saltwater aquatic species that we’re only beginning to discover, and reducing the amount of fresh water that exists on Earth.

_{Photo by Gallo Images/Getty Images}

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