Arctic: the Greenland ice cap has lost 4,700 billion tonnes of ice in 20 years

The Arctic is, without a doubt, the fastest warming region in the world. the Polar Portal is one of the initiatives set up by scientists to better understand both the mechanisms and the challenges of this warming. Today the Polar Portal announces that since the beginning of the Grace program — for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment –, 20 years ago, the Greenland ice cap lost 4.7 trillion tons of ice. The equivalent of a volume enough to cover the United States with half a meter of water. Sea ice has shrunk by 13% over the past 10 years.

These new works come to confirm others which had already announced a marked loss on the side of the edges of the ice cap. These regions are clearly the most affected by the global warming. And a recent study of Nasa explains it by the warming of the waters as much as by that of the atmosphere.

With the ice melting, the waters are rising

Recall that the melting of the arctic ice sheet is the main factor ofglobal sea level rise. Over the past 20 years, researchers from the Polar Portal believe that the melting observed by the Grace program is already responsible for a rise in water levels of around 1.2 centimeters. But the potential would be more of the order of… fifty meters!

A situation that is all the more worrying since scientists now know that the arctic ice cap has not finished suffering from global warming. Even if we immediately stopped our emissions of greenhouse gases, it would continue to melt for a long time.