April 16, 2020

Andrew Campbell 

The new study “Continuity of ice sheet mass loss in Greenland and Antarctica from the GRACE and GRACE Follow‐Onmissions” was published March 18 in the journal “The Cryosphere” of Advancing Earth and Space Science.

The climate study, led by Professor Isabella Velicogna from Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine and other researchers applied climate models to analyze summer changes in the Greenland ice sheet from data measured from the ground and the satellites. They discovered the Greenland ice sheet’s surface mass balance plunged about 320 billion tons below the annual average for 1981 to 2010. It indicated about 600 billion tons of Greenland’s ice was lost in 2019.

These results imply the year 2019 was one of the warmest on record which increased the ice melting further. The study observed another contributing factor that changes in atmospheric circulation patterns in Greenland triggered more sunlight to let in. Accordingly, the impact of the wavy jet stream helped accelerate surface ice melting.

Photo:Webshot.