GREENLAND'S EDGE LAKES ACCELERATE ICE LOSS

New research shows Greenland's freshwater lakes speed up ice loss by up to 40%. This could raise sea levels faster than expected. Find out how.

#GreenlandIceSheet, #ClimateChange, #SeaLevelRise, #GlacierMelt, #ArcticNews

https://newsletter.tf/greenland-lakes-speed-up-ice-loss-40-percent/

Greenland's glaciers are now flowing up to 40% faster into new lakes, a significant increase compared to glaciers on land.

#GreenlandIceSheet, #ClimateChange, #SeaLevelRise, #GlacierMelt, #ArcticNews
https://newsletter.tf/greenland-lakes-speed-up-ice-loss-40-percent/

UN World Day for Glaciers is Saturday, 21 March 2026

#Sermersuaq, the #GreenlandIceSheet, is rapidly melting due to manmade global heating, and likely past its tipping point (with total collapse thought to be triggered around 1.7-2.3ºC of warming).

If glaciers retreat from these fjords to terminate on dry land no longer will they calve such astonishing #icebergs – but our oceans will continue to rise, swamping our lands.

--

(This is a short excerpt from the 360º video produced with the children of #MeeqqatAngerlarsimaffiatUummannaq. Adam Sébire has received mobility funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish the project.)
Throat Singing: @j.sanimuinaq & @jensenmiannguaq • Recording: @kristofferjulmusic • Video: Adam Sébire • ©MMXXVI #KalaallitNunaat #Iceberg #WorldDayforGlaciers #UNWorldDayforGlaciers #Uummannaq #UummannaqPolarInstitute @Uummannaq_Music @NordiskKulturKontakt #Glaciers2026 #WorldGlaciersDay

Greenland thoughts from Antarctica..

I’m in Antarctica and yet I have been getting contact from journalists because Greenland is all over the press at the moment for all the wrong reasons. It’s reasonable I think to worry about what the various deranged threats towards Greenland will mean for us all also outside of Greenland. But I also think about (and yes, worry) about the friends I’ve made in Greenland over the years. Let’s hope common sense prevails and we can step back from the brink, and concentrate on the really long term problems that we are still rapidly storing up for ourselves.

Greenland is also on my mind, not just because of geopolitics, but also because the Copernicus Climate service has just put out their annual global climate highlights* for 2025 report with some disturbing results from Antarctica.

A few months ago we had a paper published called the Greenlandification of Antarctica, in which we argue that the changes in the Antarctic cryosphere increasingly resemble those we have previously observed in Greenland and the Arctic. To see the future of Antarctica, look at Greenland.

It’s been a busy time preparing for fieldwork and I didn’t manage to write anything here about it at the time, but this few eye-opening figure rather supports some of our arguments.

In this graphic, the 2025 temperature over the Antarctic region was 1.06°C higher than the average between 1991 and 2020 (a temperature anomaly). This is actually higher than any other region except the Arctic, where the temperature anomaly was reported to be 1.37°C above the 30 year average (bear in mind also that between 1991 and 2020, the temperature was also much increasing, so we’re not comparing with a pre-industrial climate here). Polar amplification was predicted long ago and as those first experiments found, it also is seen more in the Arctic than the Antarctic – but these results are a first hint of the amplification that is perhaps appearing now and may come to stay in the Antarctic.

In our paper we show the figure below (many thanks to illustrator Jagoba Malumbres-Olarta for the fine work), which shows five different cryosphere properties that are changing: 1) shrinking sea ice, 2) glacier velocities that show a seasonal cycle (mostly detected on the peninsula so far, though there are indications that Totten glacier for example has some kind of seasonal cycle, possibly modulated by sea ice), 3) total ice sheet mass loss, 4) ice shelf area and 5) annual mean surface temperature. In virtually all, the changes look very similar between Greenland and Antarctica, but with the crucial difference that the speed of changes is so far faster and more advanced in Greenland.

The latter surface temperature plot is not the same as the Copernicus 2m air temperature which is based on the ERA5 reanalysis (so a blending of computer model with observations from satellites, weather stations, balloons, ships, planes etc). In our paper we wanted to focus on the contribution that satellite data has brought as we simply have so few direct in situ observations, so we used skin or surface temperature which is measured from satellites. It’s a somewhat theoretical construct, imagine a very thin surface (hence skin) layer, where incoming and outgoing energy are summed up to give a temperature. This is calculated over both ice sheets and sea surface by our colleagues in the satellite group at DMI and this is the dataset we used here. Their results which stretch back to the 1980s show a slow upward trend in Antarctica and a steeper change in Greenland, the record stopped in 2021 in our paper but it actually shows an upward increase since and that’s also borne out by the Copernicus results. In climate and weather models we in fact first calculate the skin temperature and then back interpolate to 2m temperature, so the two are very closely related.

To check that the satellite skin temperature record was accurate, I also looked at some of the longer in situ records, the South pole station for example has a long record and shows a small increasing trend over the last 30 years or so (which also may be attributable to natural causes, it is hard to pick out the global warming trend). Analysis of the record also shows that it is largely due to decreasing cold extremes rather than necessarily higher warm extremes. Again, a pattern we also observe in the Arctic.

The analogy is not exact. As a continent, Antarctica is much further south than Greenland is to the north and it is much more insulated from warming by the circumpolar ocean than the Greenland ice sheet, sticking out in the middle of the Atlantic is. In a very real sense then, geography is destiny. Surface melt, which is also not nearly as common here in Antarctica mostly refreezes in the snowpack, whereas in the lower parts of Greenland it generally runs off and contributes directly to sea level rise. That has not yet become a major process in Antarctica, it’s still colder here and there is less surface melt for now, although from our own observations in the field, much more than I’d expected. Surface melt is definitely something we need to keep an eye on and some of our observations show how tricky that is, especially given disagreements between satellite sensors on this point .

But these are all details, the point is that Antarctica is also part of the global climate system and the same processes we’ve been observing for more than three decades in Greenland are now also starting to become apparent here too.

In one other respect Antarctica is becoming more similar to Greenland – it is becoming more contested. The Treaty that has governed Antarctica is vulnerable and subject to the same weakening of the global order that is now playing out in the North.

Let’s hope that geopolitics can settle down soon so that we can start to tackle the more serious and longer term crises coming down the line.

*I’m not sure “highlights” is quite the right word either – maybe “lowlights” would be better, but then it also starts to sound like a report on hairstyles…

#Antarctica #climate #climateChange #environment #globalWarming #Greenland #GreenlandIceSheet #iceSheet #Science

Always good to come back to work to an interesting weather + ice sheet situation...

#GreenlandIceSheet melt is peaking right now
https://fediscience.org/@polarportal/114930439503910861

New position just opened looking for scientist to work on #GreenlandIceSheet processes and global #ClimateModelling.
Come join us in #Copenhagen. Part of the EU funded #ICELINK project
#Fedijobs #GetFediHired #AcademicJobs #PhDjobs #Phdone #ClimateChange

https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=5001&ProjectId=188359&MediaId=5

PROTECT: The Sea Level Rise Question

There is currently some discussion in the Danish media about sea level rise hazards and the risk of rapid changes that may or may not be on the horizon. Some of the discussion is about IPCC estimates. That’s a little unfortunate and in fact a bit unfair as the IPCC report has not been updated since 2021, nor was it intended to have been. In the mean time there has been a lot of additional science to clear up some of the ambiguities and questions left from the last report.

I’ve been working quite a bit on the cryosphere part of the sea level question of late, so thought I’d share some insights from the latest research into the debate at this point. And I have a pretty specific viewpoint here, because I’ve been working with the datasets, models, climate outputs etc that will likely go into the next IPCC report as part of a couple of EU funded projects. As part of that, we have prepared a policy briefing that will be presented to the European Parliament in June this year, but it’s already online now and will no doubt cross your socials later this week. I’m going to put in some highlights into this post too.

Now, I want to be really clear that everything I say in this post can be backed up with peer reviewed science, most of which has been published in the last 2 to 3 years. Let’s start with the summary:.:

• The sea is rising. And the rate of rise is currently accelerating.
• The sea will continue to rise long into the future. The rate of that sea level rise is largely in our society’s hands, given that it is strongly related to greenhouse gas emissions.
• We have already committed to at least 2m of sea level rise by 2300.
• By the end of 2100 most small glaciers and ice caps will be gone, mountain glaciers will contribute 20-24% of total sea-level rise under varying emission scenarios.
• Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet mass loss will contribute significantly to sea-level rise for centuries, even under low emissions scenarios
• Abrupt sea level rise on the order of metres in a few decades is not credible given new understanding of key ice fracture and iceberg calving processes.
• By the end of this century we expect on the order of a half to one metre of sea level rise around Denmark, depending on emissions pathway. (If you want to get really specific: the low-likelihood high impact sea level rise scenario corresponds to about 0.9 m (on average), or at the 83rd percentile, about 1.6 m of sea level rise).
• Your local sea level rise is not the same as the global average and some areas, primarily those at lower latitudes will experience higher total sea level rise and earlier than in regions at higher latitudes.
• We have created a local sea level rise tool. You should still check your local coastal services provider, they will certainly have something tailor made for your local coastline (or they *should*!), but for something more updated than the IPCC, with latest SLR data, this is the one to check.

Sea level rise now is ~5mm per year averaged over the last 5 years, 10 years ago it was about 3 mm per year). Much of that sea level rise comes from melting ice, particularly the small glaciers and ice caps that are melting very fast indeed right now. Even under lower levels of emissions, those losses will increase. There won’t be many left by the end of this century.

Greenland is the largest single contributor and adds just less than a millimetre of sea level rise per year, with Antarctica contributing around a third of Greenland, primarily from the Amundsen Sea sector. The remaining sea level rise comes from thermal expansion of the oceans. Our work shows very clearly that the emissions pathway we follow as a human society will determine the ultimate sea level rise, but also how fast that will be achieved. The less we burn, the lower and slower the rise. But even under a low-end Paris scenario, we expect around 1 metre of sea level by 2300.

The long tail of sea level rise will come from Antarctica, where the ocean is accelerating melt of, in particular, West Antarctica. However, our recent work and that of other ice sheet groups shows that the risk of multi-metre sea level rise within a few decades is unrealistic. Again, to be very clear: We can’t rule out multiple metres of sea level rise, but it will happen on a timescale of centuries rather than years. High emissions pathways make multiple metres of sea level rise more likely. In fact, our results show that even under low emissions pathways, we may still be committed to losing some parts of especially West Antarctica, but it will still take a long-time for the Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate. We have time to prepare our coastlines.

Greenland is losing ice much faster than Antarctica, and here atmospheric processes and firn and snow are more important than the ocean and these are also where the læarge uncertainties are. As I’ve written about before, that protective layer of compressed snow and ice will determine how quickly Greenland melts, as it is lost, the ice sheet will accelerate it’s contribution to sea level. This is a process that is included in our estimates.

There’s so much more I could write, but that’s supposed to be the high level summary. Feel free to shoot me questions in the comment feeds. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Five years ago, a small group of European scientists got together to do something really ambitious: work out how quickly and how far the sea will rise, both locally and on average worldwide, from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. The PROTECT project was the first EU funded project in 10 years to really grapple with the state-of-the-art in ice sheet and glacier melt and the implications for sea level rise and to really seek to understand what is the problem, what are the uncertainties, what can we do about it.

We were and are a group of climate scientists, glaciologists, remote sensors, ice sheet modellers, atmospheric and ocean physicists, professors, statisticians, students, coastal adaptation specialists, social scientists and geodesists, stakeholders and policymakers. We’ve produced more than 155 scientific papers in the last 5 years (with more on the way) and now our findings are summarised in our new policy briefing for the European Parliament.

It’s been a formative, exhilarating and occasionally tough experience doing big science in the Horizon 2020 framework, but we’ve genuinely made some big steps forward, including new estimates of rates of ice sheet and glacier loss, a better understanding of some key processes, particularly calving and the influence of the ocean on the loss of ice shelves. More importantly for human societies, by integrating the social scientists into the project, we have had a very clear focus on how to consider sea level rise, not just as a scientific ice sheet process problem, but also how to integrate the findings into usable and workable information. In Denmark, we will start to use these inputs already in updating the Danish Climate Atlas. If you are elsewhere in the world, you may want to check out our sea level rise tool, that shows how the emissions pathway we follow, will affect your local sea level rise.

Our final recommendations?

#Antarctica #climate #climateChange #DMI #environment #glaciers #globalWarming #GreenlandIceSheet #Science #seaLevelRise