One of the parameters that evidence climate change has to do with the melting of glaciers around the planet. Now a new and also disturbing Video shows 13 years of melting in the Greenland ice sheet. The video was created using satellite data from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
The video reveals how the edges of the ice sheet are melting faster than the center, especially where the glaciers flow into the sea. The new research finds that between 2010 and 2023, Greenland lost 2,347 cubic kilometers of ice. If we take into account that Lake Sanabria, the largest in Spain, has “barely” 0.1 cubic kilometers of water, we are facing a disaster. More information: Lake Sanabria has one billion cubic meters of water. If we take into account that 10 cubic kilometers are equivalent to 10 billion liters, the accounts give millions of liters more melt than would enter the same number of Sanabria lakes.
The Greenland Ice Sheet has been losing mass since 1998, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and is currently the second largest contributor to the rise in sea level after the expansion of water that occurs due to warming temperatures.
However, a study published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that it is not just about quantifying ice loss. Both NASA and ESA have satellites that closely monitor the region. ESA’s CryoSat-2 uses radar to measure the height of the Earth’s surface, while NASA’s ICESat-2 uses laser measurements. Both methods have pros and cons, and the researchers wanted to be sure that the two measurements gave similar results and could be combined for greater precision.
The results showed that they can: CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 did not differ by more than 3% in their estimates of elevation change in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Their joint results revealed that the ice sheet shrank by an average of 1.2 meters over 13 years.
But that average number hides major differences across the entire layer. The edges of the ice sheet lost an average of 6.4 meters. The outlet glaciers suffered the largest loss, with a maximum of 75 meters on the Zachariae Isstrøm glacier. The worst losses appear in darker red in the new video made from the data.
Since 2020, CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 have been orbiting the same trajectories: A joint effort between ESA and NASA to ensure that data collected by both satellites can be simultaneous and synchronized.