Greenland’s glaciers are the worlds largest reserves of fresh water
and they are melting twice as fast as predicted five years ago.
Research carried out by the NASA Jet Propulsion Labroratory and the
California Institute of Technology indicate that 36 million cubic miles
of ice are now being dumped into the oceans each year. This is largely
due to an increase in air temperature of 3 degrees Celcius which
lubricates the bottom of the glaciers, making them slip faster across
the landscape.
The glaciers cover 650,000 square kilometers,
almost the size of NSW. if they melted completely sea levels would rise
by 7 meters. The researchers say that the computer models predicting
the impact of climate change will have to be reprogrammed, as it is
happening much faster than predicted using five year old data.
A summary of the article published in Science is available at Reuters.