Posted on Monday, November 07 2005 @ 0:06 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
A new study based on a decade's worth of data from radar altimeters on ESA's ERS satellites proves Greenland's ice sheet isn't decreasing. In fact the ice sheet is even growing more than five centimeters per year.
The ice sheet covering Earth's largest island of Greenland has an area of 1 833 900 square kilometres and an average thickness of 2.3 kilometres. It is the second largest concentration of frozen freshwater on Earth and if it were to melt completely global sea level would increase by up to seven metres.
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The result is a mixed picture, with a net increase of 6.4 centimetres per year in the interior area above 1500 metres elevation. Below that altitude, the elevation-change rate is minus 2.0 cm per year, broadly matching reported thinning in the ice-sheet margins. The trend below 1500 metres however does not include the steeply-sloping marginal areas where current altimeter data are unusable.
Read on over at
ESA.
