Greenland Ice Loss Worse Than Thought, Says New Study

A new report says ice loss from Greenland - already 
known to be bad - is even worse than thought.

 Climate scientists and others interested in climate change really monitor Greenland as one measure of how bad things are getting as the world warms. 

That's why you disproportionately read about Greenland in the news, and in this here blog thingy. 

Well, here's another one, 

It turns out Greenland has lost more ice than people thought. Even if  the original lower estimate was pretty huge. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"Researchers had previously estimated that the Greenland ice sheet lost about 5,000 gigaton of ice in recent decades, enough to cover Texas in a sheet 26 feet high. The new estimate adds 1,000 gigaton to that period, the equivalent of piling about five more feet of ice on top of that fictitious Texas-sized sheet."

According to The Guardian, if you include the ice loss found in this study, the Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30 metric tons of ice per hour due to climate change. 

The additional ice loss researchers found came from the glacier's edge, where it meets the water. That portion of the glaciers float on the water. Any floating ice that melts won't raise sea levels like ice loss form inland portions of Greenland ice. Inland ice melt runs downhill into the ocean, raising its level. 

 The ice floating on the waters around Greenland is like the ice cubes in your gin and tonic. If the ice melts in your drink, the water level won't rise, but you won't get as much punch from the gin, as it will get diluted.

The ice loss on the edges of the glacier - on the water - has some similarities to your now ice free, diluted gin and tonic. 

The melting ice dilutes the amount of salt in the North Atlantic. That can mess up the ocean currents that bring relatively warm water - and air - to western Europe in the winter.   

The big Atlantic Ocean circulation is known as the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, or AMOC.  Worst case scenario would be this circulation collapsing completely due to too much fresh water gumming up the system. 

A collapse of these large scale currents could really disrupt the climate of western Europe and parts of North America at the very least.  It would probably have worldwide effects, such as frigid weather in western Europe, some parts of North America turning much colder even as the world warms, while other parts of the same continent become hot and arid.

The good news is that most scientists don't see the AMOC collapsing anytime soon. But it is slowing down, so even that could cause lesser but still important weather and  climate headaches around the globe. 

Even if nothing at all happens to AMOC, all that ice melting off Greenland is of course bad news. The melt water raises ocean levels around the world. 

 Ominously, it's not just glaciers melting along the Greenland shores in just parts of that vast island. It's everywhere. "There's basically no part of Greenland that's safe from climate change," said Chad Greene, the study's lead author and a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Zeke Hausfther, noted on X, formerly Twitter, that the Greenland ice sheet has lost over 6 trillion metric tons of ice since 1970, or more than 700 tons of ice lost per person for every person on the planet today.    

Greenland is actually having a very cold winter. That doesn't matter very much because ice doesn't melt up there even in super warm winters. It's the summers we have to worry about. 

Last year, Greenland lost 196 billion tons of ice.  That's better than some previous years. There was a LOT of melting in 2023, but that was partly offset by lots of snow earlier in the year, which added some mass to Greenland before melt season started. Still the ice loss in 2023 was the most in four years. 

Still, the last year  Greenland actually to its ice mass was in 1996. It's been on a losing streak since. Which also means the rest of the world has been on a losing streak, too.