During the exceptionally warm Arctic summer of 2019, Greenland lost 600 billion tons of ice, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in two months. On the opposite pole, Antarctica continued to lose mass in the Amundsen Sea Embayment and Antarctic Peninsula but saw some relief in the form of increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land, in the eastern part of the continent.
These new findings and others by glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are the subject of a paper published today in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
“We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous,” said lead author Isabella Velicogna, UCI professor of Earth system science and JPL senior scientist.
Between 2002 and 2019, Greenland lost 4,550 billion tons of ice, an average of 268 billion tons annually – less than half what was shed last summer. To put that in perspective, Los Angeles County residents consume 1 billion tons of water per year.
Read more at University Of California – Irvine
Image: An aerial photograph taken Sept. 10 shows melt ponds formed in the crevasses of the highly deformed ice on the surface of Jakobshavn Glacier in central-west Greenland. A recent study by scientists at UCI and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that the large land mass lost 600 billion tons of ice in the summer of 2019, raising global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters. CREDIT: Linette Boisvert / NASA