Billions of tons of Greenland’s ice sheet melted into the ocean last year. It has shrunk for the 28th year in a row, and last year, it lost 80 gigatons of water, according to new statistics from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS).
“We calculated that it is the equivalent of 2.5 million litres per second the entire year, night and day,” says Andreas Ahlstrøm, a glaciologist at GEUS, in an interview with UNRIC.
In other words, 150 million litres per minute, 9,000 million (9 billion) litres per hour and 216, 000 million (216 billion) per day.
Another way of putting it into perspective is that this amounts to three Olympic standard swimming pools of fresh water being added to the ocean every second.
“80 gigatons is not an easy number to relate to, but the entire water consumption of Denmark is one gigaton per year, including industry,” Ahlstrøm says.
To give you a tangible sense of scale, 80 gigaton is the same weight as:
- 80 billion elephants
- 16,000 million 747 jumbo jets
- 242 Great Pyramids of Giza
One meter sea level rise by the end of the century
Researchers at GEUS have monitored the Greenland ice sheet for years. There may be differences from year to year, but the ice sheet volume has generally decreased for almost three decades.
“We know that temperatures are rising 3-4 times faster in the Arctic than the global average. The melting just keeps going, it is a really heavy train we have started, not easily stopped. Changes will be ongoing even if we stop CO2 emissions today,” says Ahlström.
This year, the melting on the surface was less than usual due to snow on the ice in July and August. However, glaciers lost more icebergs to the sea than usual, so the ice sheet volume diminished overall.
This year’s melting season in Greenland (autumn 2023-autumn 2024) contributed around 0.2 mm to rising sea levels. In total, the rise amounts to 15.9 mm since 1986, according to GEUS.
These estimations are not exaggerated, but rather conservative. American scientists who have researched Greenland satellite images have estimated that the ice loss is even more significant, or up to 270 gigatons per year. “Part of the explanation is that they also measure the loss of ice from local glaciers and ice caps along the periphery of Greenland, as it is a change in gravity,” Ahlstrøm explains. “Second, different methods still give different results, although we are much closer than we used to be.”
“This will hit people in Bangladesh.”
GEUS predicts that the sea level could rise by one meter globally at the end of this century with current levels of CO2 emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations (IPCC) estimates that by 2050, global sea levels will rise between 15 and 30 centimetres, on average.
In 2023, the average sea level globally reached a record high, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), based on satellite records kept since 1993.
Worryingly, the rate of increase over the last ten years is more than twice the rate of sea level rise during the first decade of the satellite records, from 1993 to 2002.
“This will hit people in Bangladesh, it will hit the low lying Pacific island states here and now,“ says Ahlstrøm. “In the long run it will hit everyone and all coastal towns will be affected.“
High-level meeting on sea level rise
An inaugural high-level meeting was organized on 25 September at the UN General Assembly to debate the danger of rising sea levels, which threaten the lives and livelihoods of 1 billion people worldwide. The representatives of small island developing States and low-lying countries welcomed that this initiative put the issue on the top of the international agenda and urged immediate international action to combat sea level rise
“The existential threat we face is not of our making,“ Feleti Teo, the Prime Minister of Tuvalu said. “For many of us, these are the hard realities we experience today, not the projections of a coming future.”
According to a recent WMO study, sea levels have risen by 9.4 centimetres in the past 30 years. However, this number increases to 15 centimetres for the Pacific Ocean, leaving low-lying Pacific islands at serious risk.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres visited low-lying island states in the Pacific this summer to see how they were affected. In his comments during the General Assembly debate, he said that the Group of 20 (G20) — responsible for around 80 per cent of global emissions — “must lead”.
“We need a strong financial outcome at the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29),“ Mr. Guterres said.
