Greenland’s ice turning to slush at record pace - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Greenland’s ice turning to slush at record pace.

The heatwave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island’s ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82% of its surface covered in ice.
The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5% for this year on Wednesday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. She says that’s expected to expand and peak on Thursday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt. More than 10 billion tonnes of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Wednesday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tonnes from Greenland in july.

“It looks like the peak will be today. But the long-term forecast is for continuing warm and sunny weather in Greenland, so that means the amount of the ice loss will continue,” she said on Thursday in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.
The scope of Wednesday’s ice melt is a number difficult to grasp. To understand just how much ice is being lost, a mere 1 billion tonnes of ice loss is equivalent to about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the Danish Meteorological Institute said. And 100 billion tonnes corresponds to a 0.28 mm (0.01 inch) rise in global sea levels. (Source: The economic times)


The above Article can also be read using the link below:

Greenland’s ice turning to slush at record pace.

Greenland Likely To Lose 4.5% Of Its Ice By End Of Century, Says Study - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Greenland Likely To Lose 4.5% Of Its Ice By End Of Century, Says Study

This research used new data on the landscape under the ice today to make breakthroughs in modelling the future.

Greenland could lose 4.5 per cent of its ice, contributing up to 13 inches of sea level rise, by the end of this century if worldwide greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, warns a new study.
The island might be ice-free by the year 3000, said the study published in the journal Science Advances.
"How Greenland will look in the future -- in a couple of hundred years or in 1,000 years -- whether there will be Greenland or at least a Greenland similar to today, it's up to us," said lead author Andy Aschwanden, Research Associate Professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute in the US.

This research used new data on the landscape under the ice today to make breakthroughs in modelling the future.
The findings show a wide range of scenarios for ice loss and sea level rise based on different projections for greenhouse gas concentrations and atmospheric conditions.
Currently, the planet is moving toward the high estimates of greenhouse gas concentrations.
Greenland's ice sheet is huge, spanning over 660,000 square miles. Today, the ice sheet covers 81 per cent of Greenland and contains eight of Earth's fresh water bodies.
If greenhouse gas concentrations remain on the current path, the melting ice from Greenland alone could contribute as much as 24 feet to global sea level rise by the year 3000, which would put much of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other cities under water, said the study.
The team used data from a NASA airborne science campaign called 'Operation IceBridge'.
Operation IceBridge uses aircraft equipped with a full suite of scientific instruments, including three types of radar that can measure the ice surface, the individual layers within the ice and penetrate to the bedrock to collect data about the land beneath the ice.
On average, Greenland's ice sheet is 1.6 miles thick, but there is a lot of variation depending on where you measure.
Between 1991 and 2015, Greenland's ice sheet has added about 0.02 inches per year to sea level, but that could rapidly increase. (Source: ndtvnews)


The above Article can also be read using the link below:

Greenland Likely To Lose 4.5% Of Its Ice By End Of Century, Says Study

Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study.

Greenland's melting ice, which causes sea levels to rise, disappeared four times faster in 2013 than in 2003 and is noticeable across the Arctic island, not just on glaciers, researchers warned on Tuesday.

"While 111 cubic kilometres of ice disappeared per year in 2003, 10 years later this figure had almost quadrupled to 428 cubic kilometres," the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Space Lab said in a statement.
Its researchers contributed to a study on changes to Greenland's ice sheet, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"These are notable and surprising changes we are seeing in the ice melt pattern," DTU professor Shfaqat Abbas Khan said.
Until now, most of Greenland's ice melt was observed on the ice cap, predominantly on the glaciers in the island's northwest and southeast.
But most of the ice loss from 2003 to 2013 was from Greenland's southwest region, which is largely devoid of large glaciers.
Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio state university and lead author of the PNAS paper, said the ice now appeared to be melting from the surface mass, "melting inland from the coastline." That means that in the southwestern part of Greenland, growing rivers of water are streaming into the ocean.
"We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers," Bevis said.
"But now we recognise a second serious problem: Increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea." He warned this would have major implications, causing additional sea level rise.
"We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point," he said, which would condemn the entire giant ice block to melting over a time scale of hundreds, or several thousand, years
The Greenland ice sheet — up to three kilometres thick — contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels some six metres (yards).
The melting ice observed in the study is caused by rising land temperatures, and in part, the fact that the ice comes into contact with waters that are increasingly warmer.
"As the atmosphere's temperature gradually rises, we will immediately notice an acceleration of the ice melt," Khan said.
While the amount varies from region to region, sea levels rose worldwide by an average of 20 centimetres (about eight inches) in the 20th century. They are currently rising by about 3.3 millimetres per year. (Source: The Economic Times)


The above Article can also be read using the link below:

Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study.