In Just Four Years, Greenland Lost A Total Of One Trillion (With A "T") Tons Of Ice

[hatrack]

It’s no news that Greenland is in serious trouble — but now, new research has helped quantify just how bad its problems are. A satellite study, published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the Greenland ice sheet lost a whopping 1 trillion tons of ice between the years 2011 and 2014 alone. And a big portion of it came from just five glaciers, about which scientists now have more cause to worry than ever.

It’s the latest story in a long series of increasingly worrisome studies on ice loss in Greenland. Research already suggests that the ice sheet has lost at least 9 trillion tons of ice in the past century and that the rate of loss has increased over time. Climate scientists are keeping a close eye on the region because of its potentially huge contributions to future sea-level rise (around 20 feet if the whole thing were to melt) — not to mention the damage it’s already done. Ice loss from Greenland may have contributed as much as a full inch of sea-level rise in the last 100 years and up to 10 percent of all the sea-level rise that’s been documented since the 1990s.

The new study takes a detailed look at ice loss in Greenland between 2011 and 2014 using measurements from the CryoSat-2, an environmental research satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 2010. It relied on a type of measurement known as altimetry — basically, measuring how the surface of Greenland’s altitude changed over time in response to ice gains or losses.

“Simplistically, if the ice sheet’s going up, we can find that as evidence that the ice sheet is growing,” said lead author Malcolm McMillan, a research fellow at the University of Leeds. “And where we see that the ice sheet surface is lowering, we can find that the ice sheet is losing ice.”

EDIT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/19/greenland-lost-a-trillion-tons-of-ice-in-just-four-years/

[PoutrageFatigue]

1. Yeah, so what, it gets hot in the summer...

[Historic NY]

2. "Greenland" is getting greener......

"I came here in 1999 and no one would have dreamed of doing this. But now the summer days seem warmer, and longer."

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/greenland-reaps-benefits-of-global-warming-8555241.html


http://modernfarmer.com/2013/10/arctic-farming/

[NickB79]

3. The limiting factor with Arctic farming is, as usual, the soil

From your Modern Farmer link:

For Nunavat greenhouses:

But soil for the greenhouse must be shipped from southern Canada

For Canadian farmers:

As in Iqaluit, the last Ice Age’s glaciers have scraped the land clear and obtaining good soil is problematic. Soil exists in river deltas but most planters don’t have access to those areas and get their soil from contractors, a system that is not necessarily environmentally sustainable.

For Greenland farmers:

Still, there are the perennial Arctic agriculture problems: poor soil

We aren't going to be offsetting the crop losses we'll see in the Midwest US as the climate warms with crops grown in Canada and Siberia. Not unless we start converting massive amounts of natural gas to synthetic fertilizer, which is not at all sustainable or environmentally friendly.

[LouisvilleDem]

4. At that rate it will be around for thousands of years

The volume of the entire ice sheet is 2,850,000 km3, and since 1 km3 of ice weighs about 0.917 Gt, the entire mass of the sheet is 2,613,450 Gt. If we assume a loss of ~350 Gt of ice per year, that means the ice sheet will be around for another 7467 years.

Data taken from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet