A new study provides what may be the first comprehensive picture of how Greenland's ice is disappearing. It may be losing ice more quickly than has been predicted in the past.
The findings suggest past models of the ice sheet have been too simplistic to accurately determine its fate and what effect its loss will have on the environment, the University of Buffalo reported.
"This information is crucial for developing and validating numerical models that predict how the ice sheet may change and contribute to global sea level over the next few hundred years," said Cornelis J. van der Veen, professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kansas.
The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second-largest body of ice on Earth, and could cause a sea level rise of a whopping 20 feet if it melts completely. To make their findings, the researchers developed a computational technique called Surface Elevation Reconstruction And Change detection that looked at data from NASA satellite and aerial missions. The study found regions of rapid shrinkage in southeast Greenland that the models don't call attention to.
The results suggest the ice sheet lost about 243 metric gigatons of ice annually between the years of 2003 and 2009.
"The great importance of our data is that for the first time, we have a comprehensive picture of how all of Greenland's glaciers have changed over the past decade," said University at Buffalo geophysicist Beata Csatho.
The study provided new estimates of annual ice loss at a high spatial resolution and showed that current models fail to accurately show how Greenland's ice sheet is changing.
"There are 242 outlet glaciers wider than 1.5 km on the Greenland Ice Sheet, and what we see is that their behavior is complex in space and time," Csatho says. "The local climate and geological conditions, the local hydrology - all of these factors have an effect. The current models do not address this complexity."
The findings were published Dec. 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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