Anomalias

Various estimates of Greenland ice loss:

Over the last few weeks, three different papers have been published that all examine ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet. What's interesting is all three papers use entirely different methods to measure the rate of ice loss. Even more interesting is that these three different methods paint a consistent picture of what's happening to Greenland.

Schrama et al 2011 uses gravity measurements from the GRACE satellites to determine any change in mass of the Greenland ice sheet (there's a great article The Riddle of the ice about Ernst Schrama's work). They find from March 2003 to February 2010, Greenland lost ice mass at a rate of 252 gigatonnes per year. A key result from their paper was to confirm that ice loss had spread to the north west of Greenland [continua ....]

Figure 1: Ice mass anomaly of the Greenland ice sheet as measured by GRACE gravity satellites (Schrama et al 2011).

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