Greenland Ice Sheet

The Greenland ice sheet sits atop the world's largest island and holds the equivalent of 7.4 m of potential sea level rise (Morlighem et al. 2017). Following a period of relative stability from the 1970s to early 1990s, the ice sheet began losing ice at an accelerating rate and has now experienced annual net ice loss every year since 1998 (Mouginot et al. 2019). The largest annual mass losses since regular monitoring began in the 1950s occurred in 2012 and 2019, with losses of -464 ± 62 Gt and -532 ± 58 Gt, respectively (Sasgen et al. 2020; estimates including all Greenland glaciers and peripheral ice caps and excluding Ellesmere Island). The record ice loss in 2019 is equivalent to ~1.5 mm global sea level rise. Total ice loss in 2020 (-293 ± 66 Gt) is substantially less than these record years, in part due to cooler summer surface air temperatures and relatively bright surface conditions in the central regions. Overall, the number of melt days was slightly above average but with large regional variation.

https://doi.org/10.25923/ms78-g612

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