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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Greenland’s melting worries scientists

Shankar Vedantam Washington Post

WASHINGTON – Greenland’s glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly the Earth’s oceans will rise over the next century, scientists said Thursday.

The new data come from satellite imagery and gives fresh urgency to worries about the role of human activity in global warming. The Greenland data is mirrored by findings from Bolivia to the Himalayas, scientists said, noting that sea-level rise threatens widespread flooding and severe storm damage in low-lying areas worldwide.

The scientists said they did not yet understand the precise mechanism causing glaciers to flow and melt more rapidly, but they said the changes in Greenland were unambiguous – and accelerating: In 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that Los Angeles uses annually.

“We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers,” said Eric Rignot, a scientist at the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

The Greenland study is the latest of several in recent months that have found evidence that rising temperatures are affecting not only Earth’s ice sheets but such things as plant and animal habitats, the health of coral reefs, hurricane severity and droughts, and globe-girdling currents that drive regional climates.

The ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are among the largest reservoirs of fresh water on Earth, and their fate is expected to be a major factor in determining how much Earth’s oceans will rise. Rignot and University of Kansas scientist Pannir Kanagaratnam, who published their findings Thursday in the journal Science, declined to guess how much the faster melting would raise sea levels but said current estimates of around 20 inches over the next century are probably too low.

While sea-level increases of a few feet may not sound like very much, they could have profound consequences on flood-prone countries such as Bangladesh and trigger severe weather around the world.