The Greenland ice sheet melted faster than ever in 2019, study finds. This is worrying news for coastal cities around the world

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To put that in comparison, between 2003 and 2016, the ice sheet lost about 255 billion tonnes of ice on average – per year.

“We have documented another record breaking year for Greenland,” said Ingo Sasgen, glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research and co-author of the study.

“What this shows is that the ice sheet is not only out of balance, but is increasingly likely to produce years of increasingly extreme losses.”

The report follows another study released last week which found that Greenland’s ice sheet has melted to a point of no return and is receding in rapid gusts, causing sea level to rise suddenly and unpredictably.
Greenland ice cap has melted to point of no return, new study finds

Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, is the largest island in the world. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. About 79% of its surface is covered with ice.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest in the world behind that of Antarctica, and its annual ice melt during the summer contributes to a rise of more than a millimeter in sea level each year.

But the situation will get worse as increasing greenhouse gas emissions continue to warm the planet.

“We see the Arctic warming about one and a half times faster in summer compared to the global average,” Sasgen said.

In 2019, the Greenland ice sheet lost 15% more ice than the previous record set in 2012, according to the study. And as the ice cap has increasingly melted since the 1990s, according to the report, several conditions led to the record melting in 2019.

Last year was the third warmest year since records began, and surface air temperatures in the Arctic were the second highest in 120 years of record breaking, according to the State of the Climate 2019.
Greenland ice cap water flows through heather and peat during exceptionally mild weather for the season on August 1, 2019 in Eqip Sermia, Greenland.

Sasgen said these ever-increasing temperatures, combined with low snowfall and warm, cloudless atmospheric conditions that allowed more solar radiation to enter the ice cap, led to the enormous melt production observed. Last year.

Interestingly, two colder years leading up to 2019 saw a reduction in ice melt. Satellite data revealed that Greenland’s ice loss in 2017 and 2018 was less than any other two-year period between 2003 and 2019, due to two unusually cold summers in West Greenland, a fall more snowy and wintry conditions in the east, according to the report. .

However, Sasgen said those cold two years did not make up for the dramatic melting of 2019. The report found that the ice sheet will continue to lose mass in response to the warming of the Arctic.

“This extreme melting is triggering feedbacks that may accelerate mass loss. This is worrying, the extremes are increasing and we understand too little how the ice sheet will react to more extreme climate variability,” Sasgen said.

Warming Ocean Causes Massive Ice Cap Loss in Greenland and Antarctica, NASA Study Finds
Sea level is expected to rise about 1 meter (3 feet) by the turn of the century, inundating low-lying coastal areas and wiping out beaches and properties. Without putting up defenses, some 300 million people around the world – including the United States, Europe and Asia – could risk losing their homes to rising seas over the next three decades, according to some projections.
From American coastal states such as Florida, major global cities like London, Shanghai and Hong Kong, to large low-lying cities like Dhaka in Bangladesh or Kolkata in India and entire Pacific islands are all threatened by rising sea levels. .

Reducing CO2 levels, Sasgen said, is the only hope of slowing global warming and reducing future extreme ice melt.

Just as we view the Romans as the civilization that invented the sewage system, Sasgen said we should think about how our society will be thought of in the years to come.

“If you think of our civilization in 2000 years, when the ice cap shrunk considerably and the sea level has probably risen by a few meters, our society will be considered the one that triggered this decrease in continental ice.” , did he declare.

“It’s not just four years, or 10 years or 100 years, it’s a process that will go on for a very long time and we are just seeing the beginning.”

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