Greenland ice loss more 'local' than thought, climate study says - LA Times

Greenland ice loss more 'local' than thought, climate study says - LA Times: "When it comes to melting ice on Greenland, climate change experts got everything right but the present.

That means Greenland’s contribution to sea level rise this century remains roughly the same – three inches – but where it comes from and how it gets to the ocean are now more clear, according to a new study that crunched 20 years of NASA data.

The findings will make climate models far more precise, according to the researchers.


Greenland ice sheet secret revealed: a chasm rivaling the Grand Canyon
Until now, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based its estimation of ice loss from Greenland on the four largest of an estimated 242 major outlet glaciers on that land mass, and admitted its modeling was at a “fairly early stage,” according to the study.

The new study, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reconstructs ice thickness at about 100,000 sites, at a scale of single glaciers or drainage basins.

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“These are billions of measurements, so the actual number of observations is really huge,” said the study’s lead author, Beata Csatho, a geophysicist at the University at Buffalo, N.Y.

There are about 656,000 square miles of ice on Greenland, or roughly three times the acreage of Texas. If all of that ice melted, it would raise average sea levels about 20 feet, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center."



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