Giving Compass' Take:

• Researchers warn that Greenland is losing ice mass seven times faster than it did in the 1990s. 

• How will this data help inform scientists on the progression of climate change? 

• Here’s an article diving deep into the study of Greenland’s melting ice and climate change. 

That pace matches the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high-end warming scenario—which could expose 400 million people to coastal flooding by 2100, 40 million more than in the mid-range prediction.

The alarming update comes from the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise, a project involving nearly 100 polar scientists from 50 international institutions.

The researchers combined 26 separate surveys to compute changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet between 1992 and 2018. Altogether, researchers used data from 11 different satellite missions, including measurements of the ice sheet’s changing volume, flow, and gravity.

The findings in Nature show that Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tons of ice since 1992—enough to raise global sea levels by 10.6 millimeters (almost half an inch). The rate of ice loss has risen from an average of 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to 254 billion tons per year in the last decade—a sevenfold increase within three decades.

Read the full article about Greenland's ice loss by Brian Bell at Futurity.