Sea Level Rise Quickens as Greenland Ice Sheet Sheds Record Amount

martyb writes:

Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:

Greenland's massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.

That is equivalent to an additional three million tonnes of water streaming into global oceans every day, or six Olympic pools every second.

Crumbling glaciers and torrents of melt-water slicing through Greenland's ice block-as thick as ten Eiffel Towers end-to-end-were the single biggest source of global sea level rise in 2019 and accounted for 40 percent of the total, researchers reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

[...] "2019 and the four other record-loss years have all occurred in the last decade," lead author Ingo Sasgen, a glaciologist at the Helmholtze Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told AFP.

The ice sheet is now tracking the worst-case global warming scenario of the UN's climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, noted Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

[...] Until 2000, Greenland's [runoff ...] was compensated by fresh snowfall.

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