Greenland is melting

Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992, raising global sea levels by 10.6 millimeters and tracking with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) high-end warming scenario. That’s according to a new assessment by the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-Comparison Exercise team that was published last month in the journal Nature and summarized by a Science Daily report. The team used data from 11 satellite missions to analyze changes in Greenland’s ice sheet between 1992-2018. Results showed the rate of ice loss rose from 33 billion tonnes per year in the ’90s to 254 billion tonnes per year in the last decade. The IPCC in 2013 predicted global sea levels would rise 60 centimeters by 2100, but Greenland’s ice losses have been tracking with the panel’s high-end warming scenario, which would mean an additional 7 centimeters, according to the report. The scenarios place more than 360 million people at risk of annual coastal flooding.