In the 1980s and 1990s, Greenland’s glaciers lost 5 metres every year. Unfortunately, over the last two decades, the rate of melting has increased more and more, with a total of 25 metres per year.
These data emerged from a study carried out by the Danish University of Copenhagen on the island’s 22,000 glaciers.
The conclusion is disheartening: all of Greenland’s glaciers are melting, even those in the north.
This issue highlights how the climate crisis is having a significant impact on the island, in fact, if the ice melted completely, it would raise the ocean level by 6 metres.
The difference from the past is that areas in northern Greenland were melting less than the most affected glaciers. This led to an underestimation of the problems in that area. One of the authors admitted that the picture is now definitive, the melting of the glaciers is happening.
The mapping of Greenland’s glaciers was made possible thanks to the analysis of 200,000 aerial photographs recovered from archives dating back as far as 130 years. Thus, researchers were able to reconstruct the ice sheet’s course even before the introduction of satellite monitoring and establish trends compared to the present day.