Greenland Ice Melt 2014 and Beyond: Follow the Water

Greenland ice melt accelerating –

Satellite measurements indicate a rapidly accelerating ice mass loss in the Greenland and Antarctica

Recent high quality satellite measurements of the ice mass of Greenland and Antarctica taken over the past eleven years indicates rapidly accelerating rates of mass loss in the past decade.

Ten years ago Greenland’s contribution to sea level rise was half a millimeter per year. Now, according to Professor Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, it has doubled to one millimeter per year.

“It’s expected that loss rate will continue to double with a period of somewhere between five to twelve years,” Box says. “So the next decade Greenland’s losing two millimeters per year, the next decade four millimeters, the next decade eight millimeters per year. You take that to the end of the century and the Greenland ice sheet is yielding about one meter of sea level [rise] – just from Greenland. So the sea level projections that have recently been published by the IPCC are very likely underestimates because they don’t they don’t contain all the processes in the models that are used to make these projections.”

 

Image credit: Patrick Rasenberg, courtesy flickr

Thomas Schueneman
Thomas Schuenemanhttps://tdsenvironmentalmedia.com
Tom is the founder and managing editor of GlobalWarmingisReal.com and the PlanetWatch Group. His work appears in Triple Pundit, Slate, Cleantechnia, Planetsave, Earth911, and several other sustainability-focused publications. Tom is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

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