Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer.

Glaciers calving icebergs in south-west Greenland,
 which has lost 3.8tn tonnes of ice since 1992, and
the rate of ice loss has risen from 33bn tonnes a
year in the 1990s to 254bn tonnes a year in the past decade.

Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to data.

That means sea level rises are likely to reach 67cm by 2100, about 7cm more than the IPCC’s main prediction. Such a rate of rise will put 400 million people at risk of flooding every year, instead of the 360 million predicted by the IPCC, by the end of the century.

Read the story from The Guardian by Fiona Harvey - “Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s.”