Accelerating Greenland ice melt set to see 100 million people flooded each year
A team of international scientists is warning that Greenland is losing ice faster than in the 1990s – the rate of ice loss has risen from 33 billion tonnes per year in the 1990s to 254 billion tonnes per year in the last decade.
The ice melt, a seven-fold increase within three decades, is tracking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) high-end climate scenario – and on current trends, Greenland ice melting will cause 100 million people to be flooded each year by the end of the century, the scientists say.
In 2013, the IPCC predicted that global sea levels would rise 60 centimetres by 2100, putting 360 million people at risk of annual coastal flooding. But this new study shows that Greenland’s ice losses are rising faster than expected and are instead tracking the IPCC’s high-end climate warming scenario, which predicts 7 centimetres more.
The team of 89 polar scientists from 50 international organisations have produced the most complete picture of Greenland ice loss to date. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) Team combined 26 separate surveys to compute changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet between 1992 and 2018. Altogether, data from 11 different satellite missions were used, including measurements of the ice sheet’s changing volume, flow and gravity.