Nasa is coming under fire for an alarming headline in a news release warning: " Satellites see Unprecedented Greenland Ice Sheet Melt".
The conclusion, combining data and models, was that the Greenland ice sheet is relatively stable in the centre, but thinning slowly at the edges.
They all come from the Greenland ice sheet, a vast mass of frozen fresh water, hundreds of miles across and up to two miles thick.
Mechanisms on the verge of being instigated include loss of Arctic sea ice, shrinkage of the Greenland ice sheet, loss of Antarctic ice shelves, and shrinkage of the Antarctic ice sheets.
This means that we can expect more than the one-meter sea level rise projected for 2100, a fact that the rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet, as well as strong indications that the western part of the Antarctic ice sheet is also melting, strongly support.
Furthermore, the high-quality dating of the WAIS Divide core will make it easy to correlate with cores from Greenland's ice sheet, allowing for a tighter coupling of records from the Artic and the Antarctic.
China has been making strenuous actions to buy mines of RE ore around the world, to maintain its dominance of the global markets, and I wonder whether this will extend to Greenland, where the melting ice-sheet is likely to ease access to the rich veins of REs and other elements that the world needs to maintain its technologies and energy supplies.
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Most of Greenland is covered by a sheet of ice that averages more than a mile thick.
Scientists note that current climate-change models predict that some parts of the Antarctic ice sheet will grow while other parts will shrink, and that parts of the Greenland ice also will melt.
But the volume of the Martian north polar cap is less than half that of the Greenland ice cap, and about four percent of the Antarctic ice sheet.
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