While it is undeniable that the fight against climate change is ramping up, slowly but surely, rising temperatures and environmental degradation are getting scarier each month. An example among others was how Greenland lost one trillion tons of ice in just three years.
Here is the animation video from the European Space Agency (ESA) explaining this:
Here is the explanation / description of the video:
Between 2011 and 2014, Greenland lost around one trillion tonnes of ice. This corresponds to a 0.75 mm contribution to global sea-level rise each year – about twice the average of the preceding two decades.
These results from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at the University of Leeds combine data from the CryoSat mission with a regional climate model to map changes in Greenland ice-sheet mass.
To the Washington Post (not exactly a bunch of treehuggers) :
A satellite study, published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that the Greenland ice sheet lost a whopping 1 trillion tons of ice between the years 2011 and 2014 alone. And a big portion of it came from just five glaciers, about which scientists now have more cause to worry than ever.
It’s the latest story in a long series of increasingly worrisome studies on ice loss in Greenland. Research already suggests that the ice sheet has lost at least 9 trillion tons of ice in the past century and that the rate of loss has increased over time.
Climate scientists are keeping a close eye on the region because of its potentially huge contributions to future sea-level rise (around 20 feet if the whole thing were to melt) — not to mention the damage it’s already done. Ice loss from Greenland may have contributed as much as a full inch of sea-level rise in the last 100 years and up to 10 percent of all the sea-level rise that’s been documented since the 1990s.
I have been covering scary climate news stories for almost a decade now. While I am quite happy we are starting to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation, I just wish Mankind as a whole would wake up to the imperative necessity of slashing carbon emissions FAST and becoming carbon neutral globally by mid-century… There are some serious business opportunities as well, just in case money were more important than our survival…