Six metre sea level rise as Greenland's ice sheet melts

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reenland ice sheet:  The midnight sun still gleamed at 1am across the brilliant expanse of the Greenland ice sheet. Brandon Overstreet​, a doctoral candidate in hydrology at the University of Wyoming, picked his way across the frozen landscape, clipped his climbing harness to an anchor in the ice and crept to the edge of a river that rushed downstream towards an enormous sinkhole.

If he fell in, "the death rate is 100 per cent", said Mr Overstreet's friend and fellow researcher, Lincoln Pitcher.

But Mr Overstreet's task, to collect critical data from the river, is essential to understanding one of the most consequential impacts of global warming. The scientific data he and a team of six other researchers collect here could yield ground-breaking information on the rate at which the melting of Greenland's ice sheet, one of the biggest and fastest-melting chunks of ice on Earth, will drive up sea levels in the coming decades. The full melting of Greenland's ice sheet could increase sea levels by more than six metres.

Read Coral Davenport’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Greenland is melting and the consequences could be catastrophic”.