By Isabela Martel When British environmental geochemist Jon Hawkings arrived in Greenland for the first time in 2012, he was impressed. “It’s mind-blowing: You look onto the horizon and it’s just ice and it goes on for 150, 200 kilometers at least.” He went to the Arctic with a group of international scientists. Their goal […]
Antarctica and Greenland‘s ice sheets are currently melting at a pace consistent with worst-case-scenario predictions for sea level rise, with serious consequences for coastal communities and the reliability of climate models. A paper published in Nature Climate Change Monday compared the latest satellite observations of polar ice melt with the predictions outlined in the Intergovernmental […]
The Earth has lost 28 trillion tonnes (approximately 31 trillion U.S. tons) of ice in just 23 years, and the climate crisis is largely to blame. The finding comes in a review paper published in The Cryosphere this month that used satellite data and numerical modelling to calculate all the ice that melted worldwide between […]
The records of Greenland‘s ice melt date back to 1948 and nothing in that record compares to what happened in 2019. The amount of ice lost was more than double what it has been any year since 2013. The net ice loss in 2019 clocked in at more than 530 billion metric tons for 2019. […]
Greenland and Antarctica have raised global sea levels by more than half an inch in the last 16 years, according to data from the most advanced laser that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has ever launched into space to observe the earth. While the figures themselves are consistent with other studies, as The […]
Greenland’s kilometers-long ice sheet underwent near-record imbalance last year, scientists have reported on Wednesday. The ice sheet suffered a net loss of 600 billion tons, which was enough to raise the global watermark 1.5 millimeters, accounting for approximately 40% of total sea-level rise in 2019. The alarming development was reported in “The Cryosphere,” a peer-reviewed […]
By Alex Matthews Every year 150 climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland’s largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea […]
Greenland experienced an unusually warm summer in 2019, which caused the world’s largest island to lose 600 billion tons of ice and raised sea levels by 0.2 of an inch, according to a NASA study released yesterday. That amount of ice loss more than doubled Greenland’s 2002-2019 annual average. The data comes from the joint […]
The polar ice caps are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s, the most comprehensive look at the data to date has found. That data, compiled and analyzed by the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (IMBIE), puts the melting of Greenland and Antarctica‘s ice sheets on track with the worst-case-scenario prediction […]