In Greenland, there is a huge ice sheet that is thinning largely over a short span of time, inducing higher sea levels. This could be a step up for climate change and global warming because it could create floods and severe weather conditions like hotter and wetter summers in Australia and colder and wet and snowier winters in Europe.

The Europe European Space Agency (ESA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are working together and have two satellites out above the ice sheets monitoring the rate of the melting. Scientists believe that the melting of the ice could increase the sea level. They also believe that it could affect the whole planet.

Using the CryoSat-2 and ICESat-2 satellites, scientists have provided the first measurements of how the thickness of the Greenland Ice Sheet has changed over 13 years from 2010 to 2023.

Published in Geophysical Research Letters, data from the satellites shows the ice sheet thinned by an average of 1.2 metres. However, across the edges of the ice sheet, the thinning was over five times larger, averaging 6.4 metres. The outlet glaciers had the most extreme thinning, with Sermeq Kujalleq in west central Greenland thinning up to 67 meters at the peak. The peak thinning was 75 metres at Zachariae Isstrøm in the northeast.

“As ice sheet mass loss is a key contributor to global sea level rise, this is incredibly useful for the scientific community and policymakers,” says lead author Nitin Ravinder, a researcher at the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling.

To collect the data, NASA’s ICESat-2 used a laser system whereas ESA’s CryoSat-2 used radar. Across the 13 years, the combined data showed the Greenland Ice Sheet shrank by 2,347 cubic kilometres. The ice sheet lost more than 400 cubic kilometres of volume each year in 2012 and 2019 when summer temperatures were exceedingly hot.