New York, March 19 During the exceptionally warm Arctic summer of 2019, Greenland lost 600 billion tonnes of ice, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimetres in two months, new research has found.
"We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous," said lead study author Isabella Velicogna, Professor at the University of California, Irvine and senior scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Between 2002 and 2019, Greenland lost 4,550 billion tonnes of ice, an average of 268 billion tonnes annually - less than half of what was shed last summer.
On the opposite pole, Antarctica continued to lose mass in the Amundsen Sea Embayment and Antarctic Peninsula but saw some relief in the form of increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land, in the eastern part of the continent, said the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The data comes from the joint US-German space mission known as Grace-FO.
"In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise," Velicogna said.
"But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of East Antarctica caused by an increase in snowfall, which helps mitigate the enormous increase in mass loss that we've seen over the last two decades in other parts of the continent," she added.
The researchers came to these conclusions in the process of establishing data continuity between the recently decommissioned Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission and its new and improved successor, GRACE Follow-On.
A project of NASA and the German Aerospace Center, the twin GRACE satellites were designed to make extremely precise measurements of changes in Earth's gravity.
The spacecraft have proven to be particularly effective at monitoring the planet's water reserves, including polar ice, global sea levels and groundwater.
The first GRACE mission was deployed in 2002 and collected data for more than 15 years, a decade longer than its intended life span.
Toward the end of this period, the GRACE satellites began to lose battery power, leading to the end of the mission in October 2017.
GRACE Follow-On based on a similar technology but also including an experimental instrument using laser interferometry instead of microwaves to gauge minute changes in distance between the twin spacecraft was launched in May 2018.
The gap between the missions made it necessary for Velicogna and her cohort to test how well data amassed by the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions matched.
( With inputs from IANS )