When you purchase through links on our land site , we may earn an affiliate commission . Here ’s how it figure out .
North Greenland ’s ice shelves have lose more than a third of their volume since 1978 and could collapse with " dramatic consequences , " scientist have discourage .
Out of the realm ’s eight enormous ice shelves , three have already experienced complete prostration , and the remaining five are in rapid retreat , scientists announced in a new subject area , published Nov. 7 in the journalNature Communications .
Ice calving from the fracture zone of a glacier crashes into the ocean in Greenland.
frappe shelves are the parts of an ice sheet that float on the water supply , preventing glacier on the land from slipping into and melt in the sea , which would increase ocean levels . If the glacier the North Greenland ice shelves support were to crock up , ocean grade could ascend by nearly 7 feet ( 2.1 measure ) .
elated : Greenland ’s glacier are melting 100 times faster than estimate
Greenland ’s ice sheet is one of only two permanent ice canvas on Earth , the other being theAntarctic water ice sheet . It is roughly three time the size of Texas , covering an country of roughly 656,000 hearty miles ( 1.7 million square km ) , concord to the U.S.National Snow and Ice Data Center(NSIDC ) .
The Greenland and Antarctic ice piece of paper make up 68 % of Earth ’s fresh water reserves , according to the NSIDC . Both have been turn a loss mass at an accelerated pace due toclimate alteration , and the sheet have lost a merge 7 trillion tons ( 6.4 trillion metric tons ) of ice since 1994 , according to a study published January 2021 in thejournal The Cryosphere .
Until now , not much thawing has been observe in Greenland ’s north , and scientists believed the ice there was relatively unchanging . To investigate further , the investigator fed a combination of planet and landing field observance into a climate example .
Their results expose a chilling motion-picture show : surface ocean temperatures had make the ice shelves hold up back North Greenland ’s glacier to lose more than 35 % of their full book since 1978 .
— 6 inscrutable structures beneath the Greenland internal-combustion engine shroud
— Greenland lost enough water ice in the last 2 decades to cover the United States in 1.5 feet of water
— 6 unexpected effect of clime alteration
Most of the loss was driven by warm water melting the chalk ledge from underneath , while calving events — where blocks of ice break aside from the shelf as icebergs — also contributed to the reduction .
And if oceans continue to warm up , the shelf could be campaign into a dramatic collapse , the researchers said .
Greenland ’s vogue of accelerated thawing is also go on in other frigid region all over the Earth . Between 2000 and 2019 , Earth ’s glacier lost an average of 294 billion tons ( 266 billion metric tons ) of mass per twelvemonth , accounting for21 % of observed sea - level rise across that time period .
Another subject published in 2021 in the daybook Earth ’s Future estimated that Earth is lose enough ice every year to pass over a frosty area thesize of Lake Superior .
