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posted by chromas on Saturday August 22 2020, @10:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the friend-or-floe? dept.

Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:

Greenland's massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.

That is equivalent to an additional three million tonnes of water streaming into global oceans every day, or six Olympic pools every second.

Crumbling glaciers and torrents of melt-water slicing through Greenland's ice block—as thick as ten Eiffel Towers end-to-end—were the single biggest source of global sea level rise in 2019 and accounted for 40 percent of the total, researchers reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

[...] "2019 and the four other record-loss years have all occurred in the last decade," lead author Ingo Sasgen, a glaciologist at the Helmholtze Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told AFP.

The ice sheet is now tracking the worst-case global warming scenario of the UN's climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, noted Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

[...] Until 2000, Greenland's [runoff ...] was compensated by fresh snowfall.

[...] In 2019, the ice sheet lost a total of 1.13 trillion tonnes, about 45 percent from glaciers sliding into the sea, and 55 percent from melted ice, said Sasgen. It gained about 600 billion tonnes through precipitation.

A study in the same journal last week concluded that the Greenland's ice sheet has passed a "tipping point", and is now doomed to disintegrate, though on what time scale is unknown.

Journal References:
Ingo Sasgen, Bert Wouters, Alex S. Gardner, et al. Return to rapid ice loss in Greenland and record loss in 2019 detected by the GRACE-FO satellites [open], Communications Earth & Environment (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-020-0010-1)

Michalea D. King, Ian M. Howat, Salvatore G. Candela, et al. Dynamic ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet driven by sustained glacier retreat [open], Communications Earth & Environment (DOI: 10.1038/s43247-020-0001-2)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2020, @12:42AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2020, @12:42AM (#1040577)

    Don't know what's going on in Florida, Florida being Florida and all, but there have not been much construction along the Californian coast.

    For good reasons, too - houses and buildings that stood for decades are falling down into the sea due to soil erosion on the coast.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 23 2020, @01:02AM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 23 2020, @01:02AM (#1040585) Journal

    Well, there was also the coastal commission saying that you shouldn't do that. (Of *course* they had had reasons, but people who tell you to wear masks and social distance also have reasons, and they just get ignored by lots of people.)

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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday August 23 2020, @01:05AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 23 2020, @01:05AM (#1040586) Journal

    It's a long time since I was in San Diego and Mission Beach. But, there were sand spits running north and south, with houses built on them. Maybe those have all been blown/washed away by now. It was the first time I ever saw dump trucks dumping sand into the ocean. I thought it was just California insanity, but a few years later I saw the same thing in Neptune Beach, FLa. Rich people with more dollars than sense had to piss away their money somehow!!