Sharjah24 – Reuters: Greenland's ice sheet has lost 4,700 gigatons of ice since 2002, enough to submerge the entire U.S. under half a meter of water, according to a Polar Portal study.
Within the overall trend, there was actually a small increase in ice high on the central region of the ice sheet, but ice loss is most severe along the West Greenland coast.
The study used satellite data from GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) and GRACE Follow On satellites to outline the dramatic changes in the ice, describing how the loss was most extreme along the edge of the ice sheet, where ice is thinning, and concluding that the melt has directly contributed 1.2 centimeters to sea level rise.
Climate scientist Andrew Shepherd, cited by Space.com, explains that for every centimeter rise in global sea level, another 6 million people are exposed to coastal flooding around the planet.
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