According to a study by Nature, a climate change journal, Greenland’s ice sheet has lost 5,091 sq km (1930 sq miles) of area between 1985 and 2022, the first full area loss to happen ever.
The 5,091 square kilometers lost is equal to an expanse roughly equivalent to the land area of the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. It was also the first study to have revealed how much ice Greenland has lost due to global warming.
“In Greenland, we have these areas around the edges where everything is just kind of retreating and crumbling,” said study co-author Alex Gardner, an earth scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“The previous methods weren’t really that great at measuring that change in the ice sheet. But the change is huge.”
Greenland’s 80% landmass is covered by glaciers, 20% of which has been reported to have been lost.
Should the entire Greenland ice sheet melt, it would result in a rise in global sea levels of about 7.4 meters (23 feet).
Due to climate change heating the Arctic at a rate four times faster than the global average, scientists predict that the Greenland ice sheet’s melting will inevitably contribute to a sea-level rise of at least 27 cm (10.6 inches).
The decline of ice sheets was seen as a consequence of glaciers retreating and losing 1,034 gigatonnes (1.034 trillion kg) of ice. This loss occurs as ice chunks break off from the glaciers through a process known as “calving” at their terminal ends.