Greenland Melting 7 Times Faster
Once again Greenland is in the news. This Washington Post headline, December 10 reads:
“Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and
are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario”
In the very good article, Chris Mooney describes the latest analysis just published in the research journal NATURE. The key point: Greenland is losing ice mass seven times faster than three decades ago. There is particularly high confidence in this analysis because it looked at 26 separate studies of satellite data. (The effort is called IMBIE, for Ice-sheet-Mass-Balance-Inter-comparison Exercise.)
The study documents exponential growth of the melting Greenland ice sheet. It went from 33 billion tons a year in the 90’s to 254 billion tons annually now. That’s essentially doubling each decade.
In this blog a few months ago, I described the phenomenon of doubling – exponential growth, with the hypothetical example of how long it would take to fill a soccer stadium starting with a single drop of water. Incredibly, these latest figures show that the melting has been doing just that, doubling for each of the last three decades, and continues to accelerate.
And it’s not just Greenland that is melting faster and faster; evidence from Antarctica is similar. Combined, those two ice sheets contain 98% of the ice on land. That equals the potential two hundred feet (60 meters) of sea level rise if all the ice melts.
The last “high water mark” for sea level was 122,000 years ago, when it reached 25 feet (8 meters) above present. It strains our imagination to believe that sea level will be tens of feet higher. No credible scientist believes a full meltdown could happen in the next couple of centuries. Yet the fact that measured melting keeps increasing and the projections keep being raised should command our attention. This all connects with the extreme polar warming and the melting of the two great ice sheets.
Considering the trillions of dollars of coastal assets in thousands of coastal communities that will be affected as the ice melts and sea level rises, we need to take seriously the latest information about accelerating melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
NOTE: As Greenland is ground zero for global sea level, the Rising Seas Institute is organizing another exclusive Fact-Finding Expedition to Iceland and Greenland, August 11-17, 2020. I will be sharing more information on that in the coming weeks. Anyone interested can contact me at this e-mail address: greenland2020@johnenglander.net