NASA launched an unprecedented study of Greenland’s melting. Now, the data are coming in
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/02/10/nasa-took-on-an-unprecedented-study-of-greenlands-melting-now-the-da
Greenland is, in fact, the largest global contributor to rising seas — adding about a millimeter per year to the global #ocean, NASA says — and it has 7.36 potential meters to give. The question is how fast it could lose that ice, and over five years, OMG [Oceans Melting Greenland] plans to pull in enough data to give the best answer yet.
[...] “Overall, together I think these papers suggest that the glaciers as a whole are more vulnerable than we thought they were,” Willis said. He says that, of course, with the aforementioned caveat that NASA is not ready yet to feed the data into a model that actually shows how this could play out over the decades of our future.
For now, we’re still stuck with official estimates from bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel said in 2013 that Greenland’s melting might at most contribute 21 centimeters to sea-level rise by 2100, with some possible addition from rapid ice collapse (this is the high-end number for what scientists call the “likely” range in a worst-case global warming scenario, to be precise). But missions like OMG, in the meantime, are giving us plenty to worry about.