The ice sheet melting in Greenland is pushing up sea levels that could be a disaster for many centuries to come.
Picture Credit - Sean Gallup/Getty Images
New satellite data reveals that Greenland has lost record amount of ice sheet in 2019, ”equivalent to a million tonnes per minute across the year”. The ice sheet lost 532 billion tonnes of ice last year, which is double the annual average since 2003. After 2010 and 2012, 2019 has recorded strong melt exceeding the previous melt by 15%.
Ingo Sasgen, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and co-author of the study says ”this is not surprising and we can expect even more extreme melting in the coming years.”
Last summer, Greenland became a high pressure zone which remained a major cause for ice sheet lost, while ongoing carbon emission remained another factor. Disturbances in the jet stream resulted in creation of high pressure which got blocked over Greenland.
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Global warming and the growing frequency of Arctic heatwaves have accelerated Greenland’s melting rate. “We see an Arctic warming about one and a half times faster in summer compared to the global average,” Sasgen said.
In response to the arctic waves, ice sheet will continue to melt which can’t be compensated by two consecutive cold years according to the study. Several factors including increasing temperature, low snowfall, warm atmospheric condition has led to penetration of more solar radiation into Greenland causing severe melting of the ice sheet.
Melting of the ice sheet is one of the major cause of rise in sea level. contributing about 0.76mm per year out of the total of about 3.5mm annually from 2005 to 2017. Greenland’s 79% of the total surface area is covered with ice. It’s annual ice melt during summer contributes more than a millimeter rise to sea levels every year.
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