Over the past 40 years, the area of the Greenland Ice Sheet has decreased by more than 5,000 square kilometers.
These losses exceed previous estimates by 20% and indicate a significant influx of fresh water into the northern Atlantic Ocean, which may have an impact on ocean currents and global climate, nplus1.ru writes.
The Greenland Ice Sheet, containing almost three million cubic kilometers of ice, has a significant impact on sea level rise as a result of climate change. Since the 1990s, the rate of ice melting has increased significantly. Researchers from the California Institute of Technology have created an ice dynamics model that takes into account the melting rate and topography, and also used ice thickness data from the BedMachine v3 topographic project.
The results showed that since 1985, the area of the Greenland Ice Sheet has decreased by 5,091 ± 72 square kilometers, which is equivalent to an ice mass of 1,034 ± 120 billion tons, exceeding previous estimates by 20%.
The largest ice losses were recorded in the Zachariah Isstrom, Jakobshavn and Humboldt glaciers.
Alex Shishlo for Rough&Polished
