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Greenland losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour, study reveals

5 comments
  • In the EU the avg water consumption per person and day is 144 litres. So the 448 Million EU citizens use about 64 Million m3 or Tonnes of water.

    In other words Greenland loses about the same amount of water as ice in two hours, like all the EU citizens use in a day.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The techniques employed to date, such as measuring the height of the ice sheet or its weight via gravity data, are good at determining the losses that end up in the ocean and drive up sea level.

    “The changes around Greenland are tremendous and they’re happening everywhere – almost every glacier has retreated over the past few decades,” said Dr Chad Greene, at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US, who led the research.

    The study, published in the journal Nature, used artificial intelligence techniques to map more than 235,000 glacier end positions over the 38-year period, at a resolution of 120 metres.

    Prof Tim Lenton, at the University of Exeter, UK, and not part of the study, said: “This additional freshwater input to the north Atlantic is a concern, particularly for the formation of deep water in the Labrador and Irminger Seas within the subpolar gyre, as other evidence suggests these are the regions most prone to being tipped into an ‘off’, or collapsed state.”

    “That would be like a partial Amoc collapse, but unfolding faster and having profound impacts on the UK, western Europe, parts of North America, and the Sahel region, where the west African monsoon could be severely disrupted,” he said.

    However, Prof Andrew Shepherd, at the University of Northumbria, UK, said: “Although there was a step-change in glacier retreat at the turn of the century, it’s reassuring to see that the pace of ice loss has been steady since then and is still well below the levels needed to disturb the Amoc.”


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