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March 21, 2020 03:30 am

Greenland's Melting Ice Raised Global Sea Level By 2.2mm In Two Months

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Last year's summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600 billion tons of ice from Greenland -- enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found. Unlike the retreat of sea ice, the loss of land-based glaciers directly causes the seas to rise, imperiling coastal cities and towns around the world. Scientists have calculated that Greenland's enormous ice sheet lost an average of 268 billion tons of ice between 2002 and 2019 -- less than half of what was shed last summer. By contrast, Los Angeles county, which has more than 10 million residents, consumes 1 billion tons of water a year. "We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous," said Isabella Velicogna, a professor of Earth system science at University of California Irvine and lead author of the new study, which drew upon measurements taken by Nasa's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellite mission and its upgraded successor, Grace Follow-On. "In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise," Velicogna said. "But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of east Antarctica caused by an increase in snowfall, which helps mitigate the enormous increase in mass loss that we've seen in the last two decades in other parts of the continent."

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