Environment Counts | Evidence for increasing rate of ice loss in northeast Greenland :

Published by on Tuesday, January 24th, 2017

ice loss

Published
by geoff
on 2014-03-17

The Greenland ice sheet has been one of the largest contributors to global sea-level rise over the past 20 years, accounting for 0.5 mm/year of a total of 3.2 mm/year. A significant portion of this contribution is associated with the speed-up of a growing number of glaciers in southeast and northwest Greenland. This paper presents evidence that the Zachariae ice stream, which extends more than 600 km into the northeast interior of the ice sheet, is experiencing sustained dynamic thinning, linked to regional warming, after more than a quarter of a century of stability. The drainage basin of the Zachariae ice stream covers 16% of the ice sheet. The authors combined GNET (56 GPS stations distributed along the Greenland inland ice) data with ice thickness measurements taken by four different satellites: the Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM), the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), and the Land, Vegetation and Ice Sensor (LVIS) from NASA; and the Environmental Satellite (ENVISAT) from the European Space Agency. They found that the northeast Greenland ice sheet lost about 10 billion tons of ice per year from April 2003 to April 2012. The Zachariae ice stream retreated about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) over the period. Nature Climate Change (2014) doi:10.1038/nclimate2161

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