Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheet May Speed Rise in Sea Level

Two new scientific studies measuring Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheet and the pace of Antarctic snowfall suggest that the sea level may be rising faster than researchers previously assumed.

The papers, both published yesterday in the journal Science, provide the latest evidence of how climate change is transforming the global landscape. University of Texas at Austin researchers, using twin satellites, determined that the Greenland ice sheet, Earth’s second-largest reservoir of fresh water, is melting at three times the rate at which it had been melting over the previous five years. A separate study by 16 international scientists concluded that Antarctic snowfall accumulation has remained steady over the past 50 years, with no increases that might have mitigated the melting of the ice shelf, as some researchers had assumed would occur.

Taken together, the two reports indicate that global sea level rise may increase more rapidly in the coming years, though the Greenland study is based on only 2 1/2 years of data. The melting of 57 cubic miles a year from Greenland’s ice sheet could add 0.6 millimeters alone, which is higher than any previously published measurement for Greenland, according to University of Texas Center for Space Research scientist Jianli Chen.

“It’s a very big number,” Chen said, noting that for at least a hundred years the sea level has increased an average of 1.8 millimeters annually.

Washington Post