The Greenland ice sheet ( da, Grønlands indlandsis, kl, Sermersuaq) is a vast body of

ice Ice is water frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 degrees Celsius or Depending on the presence of impurities such as particles of soil or bubbles of air, it can appear transparent or a more or less opaq ...

covering , roughly near 80% of the surface of

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is t ...

. It is sometimes referred to as an

ice cap In glaciology, an ice cap is a mass of ice that covers less than of land area (usually covering a highland area). Larger ice masses covering more than are termed ice sheets. Description Ice caps are not constrained by topographical features ...

, or under the term ''inland ice'', or its Danish equivalent, ''indlandsis''. An

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

, GIS, is frequently used in the scientific literature. It is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic ice sheet. The

ice sheet In glaciology, an ice sheet, also known as a continental glacier, is a mass of glacial ice that covers surrounding terrain and is greater than . The only current ice sheets are in Antarctica and Greenland; during the Last Glacial Period at Las ...

is almost long in a north–south direction, and its greatest width is at a latitude of 77°N, near its northern margin. The average thickness is about and over at its thickest point. In addition to the large ice sheet, smaller

s (such as

Maniitsoq Maniitsoq (), formerly Sukkertoppen, is a town in Maniitsoq Island, western Greenland located in the Qeqqata municipality. With 2,534 inhabitants , it is the sixth-largest town in Greenland. History Archaeological finds indicate that the area ...

and Flade Isblink) as well as

glacier A glacier (; ) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its Ablation#Glaciology, ablation over many years, often Century, centuries. It acquires dis ...

s, cover between around the periphery. The Greenland ice sheet is adversely affected by

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to E ...

. It is more vulnerable to climate change than the Antarctic ice sheet because of its position in the

Arctic The Arctic ( or ) is a polar regions of Earth, polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut), Danish Realm (Greenla ...

, where it is subject to the regional amplification of warming.Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Cambridge University Press, 2004

While only a small fraction of the ice sheet is expected to melt during the

21st century The 21st (twenty-first) century is the current century in the ''Anno Domini'' era or Common Era, under the Gregorian calendar. It began on 1 January 2001 ( MMI) and will end on 31 December 2100 ( MMC). Marking the beginning of the 21st centur ...

, it is believed that most or even all of the ice sheet is committed to melting under the present or likely near-future climate unless the recent warming is reversed, making it an example of a climate tipping point. If the entire of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global

sea level rise Globally, sea levels are rising due to human-caused climate change. Between 1901 and 2018, the globally averaged sea level rose by , or 1–2 mm per year on average.IPCC, 2019Summary for Policymakers InIPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cry ...

of ,Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) oughton, J.T., Y. Ding, D.J. Griggs, M. Noguer, P.J. van der Linden, X. Dai, K. Maskell, and C.A. Johnson (eds.) ambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 881pp

, , an

. although this is expected to take millennia to fully play out.

General

The presence of ice-rafted sediments in deep-sea cores recovered from northwest Greenland, in the Fram Strait, and south of Greenland indicated the more or less continuous presence of either an ice sheet or ice sheets covering significant parts of Greenland for the last 18 million years. From about 11 million years ago to 10 million years ago, the Greenland Ice Sheet was greatly reduced in size. The Greenland Ice Sheet formed in the middle

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recen ...

by coalescence of ice caps and glaciers. There was an intensification of

glaciation A glacial period (alternatively glacial or glaciation) is an interval of time (thousands of years) within an ice age that is marked by colder temperatures and glacier advances. Interglacials, on the other hand, are periods of warmer climate betw ...

during the Late

Pliocene The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58Thiede, JC Jessen, P Knutz, A Kuijpers, N Mikkelsen, N Norgaard-Pedersen, and R Spielhagen (2011) ''Millions of Years of Greenland Ice Sheet History Recorded in Ocean Sediments.'' Polarforschung. 80(3):141–159. Ice sheet formed in connection to the uplift of the West Greenland and East Greenland uplands. The Western and Eastern Greenland mountains constitute passive continental margins that were uplifted in two phases, 10 and 5

million years ago The abbreviation Myr, "million years", is a unit of a quantity of (i.e. ) years, or 31.556926 teraseconds. Usage Myr (million years) is in common use in fields such as Earth science and cosmology. Myr is also used with Mya (million years ago). ...

, in the

epoch.

Computer modelling Computer simulation is the process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer, which is designed to predict the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be det ...

shows that the uplift would have enabled glaciation by producing increased

orographic precipitation Orography is the study of the topographic relief of mountains, and can more broadly include hills, and any part of a region's elevated terrain. Orography (also known as ''oreography'', ''orology'' or ''oreology'') falls within the broader discip ...

and cooling the surface temperatures. The oldest known ice in the current ice sheet is as much as 1,000,000 years old. The ice cores also record human impact, such as

lead Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cu ...

from the Roman Empire. The weight of the ice has depressed the central area of Greenland; the bedrock surface is near sea level over most of the interior of Greenland, but mountains occur around the periphery, confining the sheet along its margins. If the ice suddenly disappeared, Greenland would most probably appear as an

archipelago An archipelago ( ), sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a chain, cluster, or collection of islands, or sometimes a sea containing a small number of scattered islands. Examples of archipelagos include: the Indonesian Archi ...

, at least until

isostasy Isostasy (Greek ''ísos'' "equal", ''stásis'' "standstill") or isostatic equilibrium is the state of gravitational equilibrium between Earth's crust (or lithosphere) and mantle such that the crust "floats" at an elevation that depends on its ...

lifted the land surface above sea level once again. The ice surface reaches its greatest altitude on two north–south elongated domes, or ridges. The southern dome reaches almost at latitudes 63°– 65°N; the northern dome reaches about at about latitude 72°N (the fourth highest "summit" of Greenland). The crests of both domes are displaced east of the centre line of Greenland. The unconfined ice sheet does not reach the sea along a broad front anywhere in Greenland, so that no large ice shelves occur. The ice margin just reaches the sea, however, in a region of irregular topography in the area of

Melville Bay Melville Bay ( kl, Qimusseriarsuaq; da, Melville Bugt), is a large bay off the coast of northwestern Greenland. Located to the north of the Upernavik Archipelago, it opens to the south-west into Baffin Bay. Its Kalaallisut name, ''Qimusseriars ...

southeast of Thule, as well as in

Jokel Bay Jokel Bay ( da, Jøkelbugten) is a large bay in North Eastern Greenland. The area of the bay is uninhabited. Administratively Jokel Bay and its surroundings belong to the Northeast Greenland National Park. The bay was named after an old Norse wor ...

. Large

outlet glacier Glacier morphology, or the form a glacier takes, is influenced by temperature, precipitation, topography, and other factors. The goal of glacial morphology is to gain a better understanding of glaciated landscapes and the way they are shaped. Ty ...

s, which are restricted tongues of the ice sheet, move through bordering valleys around the periphery of Greenland to calve off into the ocean, producing the numerous icebergs that sometimes occur in North Atlantic shipping lanes. The best known of these outlet glaciers is

Jakobshavn Glacier Jakobshavn Glacier ( da, Jakobshavn Isbræ), also known as Ilulissat Glacier ( kl, Sermeq Kujalleq), is a large outlet glacier in West Greenland. It is located near the Greenlandic town of Ilulissat (colonial name in da, Jakobshavn) and ends a ...

( kl, Sermeq Kujalleq), which, at its terminus, flows at speeds of per day. Radar reflector installation Greenland

On the ice sheet, temperatures are generally substantially lower than elsewhere in Greenland, due to the local effects of ice-albedo feedback. The lowest mean annual temperatures, about , occur on the north-central part of the north dome, and temperatures at the crest of the south dome are about . On 22 December 1991, a temperature of was recorded at an automatic weather station near the topographic summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet, making it the lowest temperature ever recorded in the

Northern Hemisphere The Northern Hemisphere is the half of Earth that is north of the Equator. For other planets in the Solar System, north is defined as being in the same celestial hemisphere relative to the invariable plane of the solar system as Earth's Nort ...

. The record went unnoticed for more than 28 years and was finally recognized in 2020.

The ice sheet as a record of past climates

The ice sheet, consisting of layers of compressed snow from more than 100,000 years, contains in its ice today's most valuable record of past climates. In the past decades, scientists have drilled

ice cores An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper ones, and an ice core contains ic ...

up to deep. Scientists have, using those ice cores, obtained information on (proxies for)

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied o ...

, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and forest fires. Subglacial sediment from ~ beneath the ice stored since 1966 indicates that Greenland was completely ice-free and vegetated at least once within the last million years. This was not expected and may show Greenland to be more fragile and sensitive to climate change than previously thought.

Recent climate change

General considerations on rate of change

In the earlier decades, an area in the North Atlantic including southern Greenland was one of the only areas in the World showing cooling rather than warming, and Greenland had shown more complex temperature trends than the other areas of the world. A 2006 paper on Greenland's temperature record showed that the warmest year on record was 1941 while the warmest decades were the 1930s and 1940s. The data used was from stations on the south and west coasts, most of which did not operate continuously the entire study period. However, later and more complete data sets have established strong warming in the period 1979–2005 (consistent with the concurrently observed

Arctic sea ice decline Arctic sea ice decline has occurred in recent decades due to the effects of climate change on oceans, with declines in sea ice area, extent, and volume. Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been melting more in summer than it refreezes in the winter. ...

and its ice-albedo feedback) As the Greenland Ice Sheet had experienced unprecedented melting since the detailed records began, and is likely to contribute substantially to

as well as to possible changes in

ocean circulation An ocean current is a continuous, directed movement of sea water generated by a number of forces acting upon the water, including wind, the Coriolis effect, breaking waves, cabbeling, and temperature and salinity differences. Depth contours, s ...

in the future. Greenland Albedo Change

Several factors determine the net rate of growth or decline. These are: # Accumulation and melting rates of snow in the central parts # Melting of surface snow and ice which then flows into moulins, falls and flows to bedrock, lubricates the base of glaciers, and affects the speed of

glacial motion Glacial motion is the motion of glaciers, which can be likened to rivers of ice. It has played an important role in sculpting many landscapes. Most lakes in the world occupy basins scoured out by glaciers. Glacial motion can be fast (up to , ob ...

. This flow is implicated in accelerating the speed of glaciers and thus the rate of

glacial calving Ice calving, also known as glacier calving or iceberg calving, is the breaking of ice chunks from the edge of a glacier.Essentials of Geology, 3rd edition, Stephen Marshak It is a form of ice ablation or ice disruption. It is the sudden release ...

. # Melting of ice along the sheet's margins (runoff) and basal hydrology, # Iceberg calving into the sea from outlet glaciers also along the sheet's edges The last time that the combination of these factors had resulted in a net mass gain was in 1996. As of 2022, Greenland ice sheet had been losing ice for 26 years in a row. The snow line is the dividing line between the area, above the snow line, where snow continues to accumulate during the summer, and the area below the snow line which experiences summer melting. The melt zone, where summer warmth turns snow and ice into slush and

melt pond Melt ponds are pools of open water that form on sea ice in the warmer months of spring and summer. The ponds are also found on glacial ice and ice shelves. Ponds of melted water can also develop under the ice. Melt ponds are usually darker tha ...

s of

meltwater Meltwater is water released by the melting of snow or ice, including glacial ice, tabular icebergs and ice shelves over oceans. Meltwater is often found in the ablation zone of glaciers, where the rate of snow cover is reducing. Meltwater can be ...

, has been expanding at an accelerating rate in recent years. When the meltwater seeps down through cracks in the sheet, it accelerates the melting and, in some areas, allows the ice to slide more easily over the bedrock below, speeding its movement to the sea. Besides contributing to global

, the process adds

freshwater Fresh water or freshwater is any naturally occurring liquid or frozen water containing low concentrations of dissolved salts and other total dissolved solids. Although the term specifically excludes seawater and brackish water, it does include ...

to the ocean, which may disturb ocean circulation and thus regional climate. Melt Ponds on the Greenland Ice Sheet

An examination of 32 outlet glaciers in southeast Greenland indicates that the acceleration is significant only for marine-terminating outlet glaciers—glaciers that calve into the ocean. A 2008 study noted that the thinning of the ice sheet is most pronounced for marine-terminating outlet glaciers. As a result of the above, all concluded that the only plausible sequence of events is that increased thinning of the terminus regions, of marine-terminating outlet glaciers, ungrounded the glacier tongues and subsequently allowed acceleration, retreat and further thinning. Two mechanisms have been utilized to explain the change in velocity of the Greenland Ice Sheets outlet glaciers. The first is the enhanced meltwater effect, which relies on additional surface melting, funneled through moulins reaching the glacier base and reducing the friction through a higher basal water pressure. (Not all

is retained in the

and some moulins drain into the ocean, with varying rapidity.) This idea was observed to be the cause of a brief seasonal acceleration of up to 20% on Sermeq Kujalleq in 1998 and 1999 at Swiss Camp. The acceleration lasted between two and three months and was less than 10% in 1996 and 1997 for example. They offered a conclusion that the "coupling between surface melting and ice-sheet flow provides a mechanism for rapid, large-scale, dynamic responses of ice sheets to climate warming". Examination of recent rapid supra-glacial lake drainage documented short term velocity changes due to such events, but they had little significance to the annual flow of the large outlet glaciers. Inlandsis moulin Groenland 2009 Expédition ACarré

Inlandsis moulin Groenland 2009 Expédition ACarré

The second mechanism is a force imbalance at the calving front due to thinning causing a substantial non-linear response. In this case an imbalance of forces at the calving front propagates up-glacier. Thinning causes the glacier to be more buoyant, reducing frictional back forces, as the glacier becomes more afloat at the calving front. The reduced friction due to greater buoyancy allows for an increase in velocity. This is akin to letting off the emergency brake a bit. The reduced resistive force at the calving front is then propagated up-glacier via longitudinal extension because of the backforce reduction.If the enhanced meltwater effect is the key, then since meltwater is a seasonal input, velocity would have a seasonal signal and all glaciers would experience this effect. If the force imbalance effect is the key, then the velocity will propagate up-glacier, there will be no seasonal cycle, and the acceleration will be focused on calving glaciers. Warmer temperatures in the region have brought increased precipitation to Greenland, and part of the lost mass has been offset by increased snowfall. However, there are only a small number of weather stations on the island, and though satellite data can examine the entire island, it has only been available since the early 1990s, making the study of trends difficult. It has been observed that there is more precipitation where it is warmer, up to 1.5 meters per year on the southeast flank, and less precipitation or none on the 25–80 percent (depending on the time of year) of the island that is cooler. On the other hand, global warming is increasing growth of algae on the ice sheet. This darkens the ice causing it to absorb more sunlight and potentially increasing the rate of melting.

Observations

2000s

Cambios en la capa de hielo de Groenlandia

The

IPCC Third Assessment Report The IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), ''Climate Change 2001'', is an assessment of available scientific and socio-economic information on climate change by the IPCC. Statements of the IPCC or information from the TAR are often used as a referenc ...

was published in 2001, and it estimated the accumulation to 520 ± 26

Gigatonne The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton (United States c ...

s of ice per year, runoff and bottom melting to 297±32 Gt/yr and 32±3 Gt/yr, respectively, and iceberg production to 235±33 Gt/yr. On balance, the IPCC estimates −44 ± 53 Gt/yr, which means that the ice sheet may currently be melting. Data from 1996 to 2005 shows that the ice sheet is thinning even faster than supposed by IPCC. According to the study, in 1996 Greenland was losing about per year in volume from its ice sheet. In 2005, this had increased to about a year due to rapid thinning near its coasts, while in 2006 it was estimated at per year. It was estimated that in the year 2007 Greenland ice sheet melting was higher than ever, . Also snowfall was unusually low, which led to unprecedented negative Surface Mass Balance. If iceberg calving has happened as an average, Greenland lost 294 Gt of its mass during 2007 (one km³ of ice weighs about 0.9 Gt). By 2002, the area below the snow line was found to have increased by 16% since the beginning of detailed measurements in 1979. The area of melting in 2002 broke all previous records. The number of glacial earthquakes at the Helheim Glacier and the northwest Greenland glaciers increased substantially between 1993 and 2005. In 2006, estimated monthly changes in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet suggest that it is melting at a rate of about per year. A more recent study, based on reprocessed and improved data between 2003 and 2008, reports an average trend of per year. These measurements came from the US space agency's GRACE (

Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) was a joint mission of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Twin satellites took detailed measurements of Earth's gravity field anomalies from its launch in March 2002 to the end of its ...

) satellite, launched in 2002, as reported by BBC. Using data from two ground-observing satellites,

ICESAT ICESat (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite) was a NASA satellite mission for measuring ice sheet mass balance, cloud and aerosol heights, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. It operated as part of NASA's Earth Obs ...

and

ASTER Aster or ASTER may refer to: Biology * ''Aster'' (genus), a genus of flowering plants ** List of ''Aster'' synonyms, other genera formerly included in ''Aster'' and still called asters in English * Aster (cell biology), a cellular structure shap ...

, a study published in ''Geophysical Research Letters'' (September 2008) shows that nearly 75 percent of the loss of Greenland's ice can be traced back to small coastal glaciers. Notable calving events had also been recorded in 2000s. For instance, Helheim Glacier in East Greenland had a stable terminus from the 1970s–2000. In 2001–2005 the glacier retreated and accelerated from /day, while thinning up to in the terminus region. Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier, East Greenland had a stable terminus history from 1960 to 2002. The glacier velocity was /day in the 1990s. In 2004–2005 it accelerated to /day and thinned by up to in the lower reach of the glacier. On Sermeq Kujalleq the acceleration began at the calving front and spread up-glacier in 1997 and up to inland by 2003. On Helheim the thinning and velocity propagated up-glacier from the calving front. In each case the major outlet glaciers accelerated by at least 50%, much larger than the impact noted due to summer meltwater increase. On each glacier the acceleration was not restricted to the summer, persisting through the winter when surface meltwater is absent. Between 2000 and 2001, Northern Greenland's

Petermann glacier Petermann Glacier ( da, Petermann Gletsjer) is a large glacier located in North-West Greenland to the east of Nares Strait. It connects the Greenland ice sheet to the Arctic Ocean at 81°10' north latitude, near Hans Island. The glacier and its f ...

lost of floating ice, and a piece of Petermann suddenly broke away in 2008. Sermeq Kujalleq broke up by 2005, losing in a dramatic event credited by some

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding t ...

scientists with raising worldwide awareness of glacial response to global climate change. In 2007, the

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report ''Climate Change 2007'', the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published in 2007 and is the fourth in a series of reports intended to assess scientific, technical and socio ...

noted that most mass balance estimates indicate accelerating mass loss from Greenland during the 1990s up to 2005. Assessment of the data and techniques suggests a mass balance for the Greenland Ice Sheet ranging between growth of 25 Gt/yr and loss of 60 Gt/yr for 1961 to 2003, loss of 50 to 100 Gt/yr for 1993 to 2003 and loss at even higher rates between 2003 and 2005.

Since 2010

A sheet of ice measuring broke off from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland in August 2010. Researchers from the Canadian Ice Service located the calving from

satellite images Satellite images (also Earth observation imagery, spaceborne photography, or simply satellite photo) are images of Earth collected by imaging satellites operated by governments and businesses around the world. Satellite imaging companies sell ima ...

taken on August 5. The images showed that Petermann lost about one-quarter of its 70 km-long (43 mile) floating

ice shelf An ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are only found in Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada, and the Russian Arctic. The ...

. Another large ice sheet twice the area of

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

, about , broke away from that glacier in July 2012. In July 2012, melt zone extended to 97 percent of the ice sheet's cover. Ice cores show that events such as this occur approximately every 150 years on average. The last time a melt this large happened was in 1889. This particular melt may be part of cyclical behavior; however, Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist suggested that "...if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome." This was the first directly observed example of what came to be known as a "massive melting event": the ice core research most melting events before the 21st century were localized rather than widespread across the bulk of the Greenland ice sheet. At the end of 2012, the analysis of gravity data from

GRACE Grace may refer to: Places United States * Grace, Idaho, a city * Grace (CTA station), Chicago Transit Authority's Howard Line, Illinois * Little Goose Creek (Kentucky), location of Grace post office * Grace, Carroll County, Missouri, an uninco ...

satellites indicated that the Greenland ice sheet lost approximately 2900 Gt (0.1% of its total mass) between March 2002 and September 2012. The mean mass loss rate for 2008–2012 was 367 Gt/year.In 2015,

calved an iceberg about thick with an area of about . Mass changes of the Greenland Ice Sheet between 2002 and 2019

A 2013 ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

'' study identified a contribution from the optically thin liquid-bearing

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may co ...

s to the extent of ice melt during July 2012. In 2016, another paper suggested that clouds in general enhance Greenland ice sheet's meltwater runoff by more than 30% due to decreased meltwater refreezing in the

firn __NOTOC__ Firn (; from Swiss German "last year's", cognate with ''before'') is partially compacted névé, a type of snow that has been left over from past seasons and has been recrystallized into a substance denser than névé. It is ice that ...

layer at night. In 2019, another mass melting event (covering more than 300,000 square miles) occurred in both June and July, due to cloud cover and high temperatures. In August 2020, scientists reported that the Greenland ice sheet

lost Lost may refer to getting lost, or to: Geography *Lost, Aberdeenshire, a hamlet in Scotland * Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, or LOST, a hiking and cycling trail in Florida, US History *Abbreviation of lost work, any work which is known to have bee ...

a record amount of 532 billion metric tons of ice during 2019, surpassing the old record of 464 billion metric tons in 2012 and returning to high melt rates, and provide explanations for the reduced ice loss in 2017 and 2018. A study published in 2020 estimated, by combining 26 individual estimates of mass balance derived by tracking changes in Greenland's ice sheet volume, speed and gravity as part of the

Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) is an international scientific collaboration attempting to improve estimates of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet contribution to sea level rise and to publish data and analyses concer ...

, that the Greenland Ice Sheet had lost a total of 3,902 gigatons (Gt) of ice between 1992 and 2018. The rate of ice loss has increased over time from 26 ± 27 Gt/year between 1992 and 1997 to 244 ± 28 Gt/year between 2012 and 2017 with a peak mass loss rate of 275 ± 28 Gt/year during the period 2007 and 2012. In July 2021, a new surge of widespread melting began, covering 340,000 square miles of the ice sheet, and melting more than 8 billion tons of ice per day for several days. In August 2021, as high temperatures continued over Greenland, with the melt extent at 337,000 square miles, rain fell for 13 hours at Greenland's Summit Station (at 10,551 feet elevation.) Researchers had no rain gauges to measure the rainfall, because temperatures at the summit have risen above freezing only three times since 1989 and it had never rained there before. The total mass of the Greenland ice sheet is roughly 2,850,000 gigatons (Gt). A loss of 5,000 gigatons would be roughly 0,2% of the total ice mass.

Future ice loss

Due to the enormous thickness of the central Greenland ice sheet, even the most extensive melting event can only affect a small fraction of it before the start of the freezing season. In scientific literature, they are described as "short-term variability": a 2020 paper found that the current models underestimate the extent and frequency of such events, meaning that the ice sheet decline in Greenland and

Antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest contine ...

tracks worst-case scenarios of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report's

sea-level rise Globally, sea levels are rising due to human-caused climate change. Between 1901 and 2018, the globally averaged sea level rose by , or 1–2 mm per year on average.IPCC, 2019Summary for Policymakers InIPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryo ...

projections, However, even those worst-case scenarios only involve a minor portion of the ice sheet during the 21st century: in 2021, the

IPCC Sixth Assessment Report The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the sixth in a series of reports which assess scientific, technical, and socio-economic information concerning climate change. Three ...

estimated that under SSP5-8.5, the scenario associated with the highest global warming, Greenland ice sheet melt would add around 13 cm to the global sea levels (with a likely range between 9 and 18cm and a very likely range ( 5-95% confidence level) between 5 and 23 cm), while the "moderate" SSP2-4.5 scenario adds 8 cm with a likely and very likely range of 4-13 cm and 1 cm to 18 cm, respectively. The scenario which largely fulfils the

Paris Agreement The Paris Agreement (french: Accord de Paris), often referred to as the Paris Accords or the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty on climate change. Adopted in 2015, the agreement covers climate change mitigation, Climate change a ...

goals, SSP1-2.6, adds around 6 cm and no more than 15 cm, with a small chance of the ice sheet gaining mass and thus reducing the sea levels by around 2 cm. For comparison, Greenland Ice Sheet is estimated to have contributed about 0.68 mm per year between 2012 and 2017, which is already a significant acceleration from the 1990s, when it contributed 0.07 mm per year between 1992 and 1997. This net contribution for the 2012–2016 period was also equivalent to 37% of sea level rise from ''land ice'' sources (excluding thermal expansion). However, while the ice sheet's massive size makes it insensitive to temperature changes in the short run, it also commits it to enormous changes down the line. Many scientists who study the ice losses in Greenland consider that an increase in temperature of two or three degrees Celsius would result in a complete melting of Greenland's ice.If the entire of ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise . Recently, fears have grown that continued

will make the Greenland Ice Sheet cross a threshold where long-term melting of the ice sheet is inevitable.

Climate model Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the c ...

s project that local warming in Greenland will be to during this century. Ice sheet models project that such a warming would initiate the long-term melting of the ice sheet, leading to a complete melting of the ice sheet (over centuries), resulting in a global sea level rise of about . Such a rise would inundate almost every major coastal city in the

world In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

. How fast the melt would eventually occur is a matter of discussion. According to the IPCC 2001 report, such warming would, if kept from rising further after the 21st Century, result in 1 to 5 meter sea level rise over the next millennium due to Greenland ice sheet melting. Some scientists have cautioned that these rates of melting are overly optimistic as they assume a linear, rather than erratic, progression.

James E. Hansen James Edward Hansen (born March 29, 1942) is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the The Earth Institute, Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research ...

has argued that multiple

positive feedback Positive feedback (exacerbating feedback, self-reinforcing feedback) is a process that occurs in a feedback loop which exacerbates the effects of a small disturbance. That is, the effects of a perturbation on a system include an increase in the ...

s could lead to nonlinear ice sheet disintegration much faster than claimed by the IPCC. According to a 2007 paper, "we find no evidence of millennial lags between forcing and ice sheet response in

paleoclimate Paleoclimatology (British spelling, palaeoclimatology) is the study of climates for which direct measurements were not taken. As instrumental records only span a tiny part of Earth's history, the reconstruction of ancient climate is important to ...

data. An ice sheet response time of centuries seems probable, and we cannot rule out large changes on decadal time-scales once wide-scale surface melt is underway." Mean regional trends in ice thickness and front position

Mean regional trends in ice thickness and front position

In a 2013 study published in ''Nature'', 133 researchers analyzed a Greenland ice core from the Eemian

interglacial An interglacial period (or alternatively interglacial, interglaciation) is a geological interval of warmer global average temperature lasting thousands of years that separates consecutive glacial periods within an ice age. The current Holocene in ...

. They concluded that during this geological period, roughly 130,000–115,000 years ago, the GIS (Greenland Ice Sheet) was 8 degrees C warmer than today. This resulted in a thickness decrease of the northwest Greenland ice sheet by 400 ± 250 metres, reaching surface elevations 122,000 years ago of 130 ± 300 metres lower than at present. A 2021 analysis of sub-glacial sediment at the bottom of a 1.4 km Greenland ice core finds that the Greenland ice sheet melted away at least once during the last million years, and therefore strongly suggests that its tipping point is below the 2.5 °C maximum positive temperature excursion over that period. On 13 August 2020, Communications Earth and Environment, a Nature Research journal published a study on "Dynamic ice loss from the Greenland Ice sheet driven by sustained glacier retreat". The situation was described as being past the "point of no return" and attributed to two factors, "increased surface meltwater runoff and ablation of marine-terminating outlet glaciers via calving and submarine melting, termed ice discharge." A 2022 assessment of

tipping points in the climate system In climate science, a tipping point is a critical threshold that, when crossed, leads to large and often irreversible changes in the climate system. If tipping points are crossed, they are likely to have severe impacts on human society. Tippin ...

estimated that the Greenland ice sheet would most likely be committed to long-term disintegration around 1.5°C of global warming: in the best case, its disintegration would not be set in motion until 3°C, but in the worst case, it could already be inevitable unless the global warming is reduced below 0.8°C. At the same time, it also noted that the fastest plausible timeline for a disintegration is 1000 years after the tipping threshold is crossed, while it is far more likely to take place over 10,000 years; the longest possible estimate is 15,000 years. It had also estimated that due to the ice-albedo feedback, a total loss of the ice sheet would increase the global temperatures by 0.13°C, while the local temperatures would increase by between 0.5°C and 3.0°C.

Meltwater run-off

Meltwater around Greenland may transport nutrients and organic carbon to the ocean. Measurements of the amount of iron in meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet show that extensive melting of the ice sheet might add an amount of this micronutrient to the Atlantic Ocean equivalent to that added by airborne dust. However much of the particles and iron derived from glaciers around Greenland may be trapped within the extensive fjords that surround the island and, unlike the

HNLC High-nutrient, low-chlorophyll (HNLC) regions are regions of the ocean where the abundance of phytoplankton is low and fairly constant despite the availability of macronutrients. Phytoplankton rely on a suite of nutrients for cellular function. Ma ...

Southern ocean where iron is an extensive limiting micronutrient, biological production in the North Atlantic is subject only to very spatially and temporally limited periods of iron limitation. Nonetheless, high productivity is observed in the immediate vicinity of major marine terminating glaciers around Greenland and this is attributed to meltwater inputs driving the upwelling of seawater rich in macronutrients. The United States built a secret nuclear powered base, called

Camp Century Camp Century was an Arctic United States military scientific research base in Greenland. situated 240 km (150 miles) east of Thule Air Base. When built, Camp Century was publicized as a demonstration for affordable ice-cap military outposts ...

, in the Greenland ice sheet. In 2016, a group of scientists evaluated the environmental impact and estimated that due to changing weather patterns over the next few decades, melt water could release the

nuclear waste Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons r ...

, 20,000 liters of

chemical waste Chemical waste is any excess, unusable, or unwanted chemical, especially those that cause damage to human health or the environment. Chemical waste may be classified as hazardous waste, non-hazardous waste, universal waste, and household haz ...

and 24 million liters of untreated sewage into the environment. However, so far neither US or Denmark has taken responsibility for the clean-up. A study published in 2016, by researchers from the

University of South Florida The University of South Florida (USF) is a public research university with its main campus located in Tampa, Florida, and other campuses in St. Petersburg and Sarasota. It is one of 12 members of the State University System of Florida. USF is ...

, Canada and the Netherlands, used

satellite data to estimate freshwater flux from Greenland. They concluded that freshwater runoff is accelerating, and could eventually cause a disruption of AMOC in the future, which would affect Europe and North America. A 2018 international study found that the fertilizing effect of meltwater around Greenland is highly sensitive to the glacier grounding line depth it is released at. Retreat of Greenland's large marine-terminating glaciers inland will diminish the fertilizing effect of meltwater- even with further large increases in freshwater discharge volume. A 2015 study by climate scientists

Michael Mann Michael Kenneth Mann (born February 5, 1943) is an American director, screenwriter, and producer of film and television who is best known for his distinctive style of crime drama. His most acclaimed works include the films ''Thief'' (1981), ' ...

of Penn State and

Stefan Rahmstorf Stefan Rahmstorf (born 22 February 1960) is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph. ...

from the

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK, German: ''Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung'') is a German government-funded research institute addressing crucial scientific questions in the fields of global change, climate imp ...

suggests that the observed cold blob in the North Atlantic during years of temperature records is a sign that the Atlantic Ocean's

Meridional overturning circulation Thermohaline circulation (THC) is a part of the large-scale ocean circulation that is driven by global density gradients created by surface heat and freshwater fluxes. The adjective ''thermohaline'' derives from '' thermo-'' referring to tem ...

(AMOC) may be weakening. They published their findings, and concluded that the AMOC circulation shows exceptional slowdown in the last century, and that Greenland melt is a possible contributor. 16-008-NASA-2015RecordWarmGlobalYearSince1880-20160120

16-008-NASA-2015RecordWarmGlobalYearSince1880-20160120

Notes

References

External links

Real Climate
the Greenland Ice

GEUS has much scientific material on Greenland.

Lecture 2: Modern Glaciers and Ice Sheets.
GRACE ice mass measurement:
"Recent Land Ice Mass Flux from SpaceborneGravimetry"

Bristol University , mottoeng = earningpromotes one's innate power (from Horace, ''Ode 4.4'') , established = 1595 – Merchant Venturers School1876 – University College, Bristol1909 – received royal charter , type ...

Greenland Ice Mass Loss: Jan. 2004 – June 2014
(NASA animation)
Greenland Ice Cap, 1942-1944 Report
at Dartmouth College Library
Greenland Ice Cap literary Survey/Bibliography 1953
at Dartmouth College Library {{Arctic topics Bodies of ice of Greenland Climate of Greenland Ice sheets Articles containing video clips