Copenhagen: Greenland’s very large ice sheet has lost enough ice in the last 20 years to soak the entire United States in half a meter of water, according to data released this week by Danish researchers.
The climate is warming faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on this planet and melted ice from Greenland is now a major factor in the increase in the ocean of earth, according to NASA.
Because the measurement began in 2002, Greenland ice sheets had lost around 4,700 billion tons of ice, said the polar portal, a joint project involving several Danish Arctic research institutions.
It represents 4,700 cubic kilometers of melted water – “enough to cover the entire US half meter” – and has contributed 1.2 centimeters to the sea level up, the Arctic monitoring website is added.
The Polar Portal findings are based on satellite imagery from the Rahmat As-German program (gravitational recovery and climate experiment), which shows the most severe melting ice near the coast of the Arctic area, on the edge of a piece of ice.
In this peripheral zone, “Independent observations also showed that ice was thinning, that the glacier front retreated in Fjords and on land, and that there was a greater smelting rate than the surface of the ice”, the website said.
West Coast Greenland is very affected, according to the data.