Post

The ice loss of the Greenland Ice Sheet is hard to grasp! This is what the 30 million tonnes of ice that Greenland loses every hour looks like, if it were positioned next to the Eiffel tower before melting:

The 139 Gt loss in the European State of the Climate report equates to about 16 million tonnes per hour by my reckoning, but that's still a shocking rate.

The main difference is that that the Guardian article is reporting on studies that present long-term averages (over 38 years in one case, since 2003 in another) whereas the State of the Climate Report is an assessment just for 2025.

The melting is accelerating. So - a higher annual loss rate from the last deade is only to be expected, yeah. I did wonder about those numbers myself. NASA's GRACE has even higher estimates: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30879

Here's a more up to date version. The graph shows cumulative ice loss, and in fact indicates a slightly slower rate since 2012 than in the first 10 years of the record. This is reflected in a slightly lower average rate than that quoted in the earlier article. svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31156/