Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018

In 2019, we published an updated assessment of the mass balance of Greenland. We found that between 1992 and 2018, the Greenland Ice Sheet lost 3902 billion tonnes of ice, contributing 10.8 mm to global mean sea-level rise. Although Greenland has been losing ice since the early 1990s, annual losses have risen since then, with the rate of mass loss rising from 33 billion tonnes per year to 254 billion tonnes per year in the last decade – a seven-fold increase. Further, we found that half of the ice losses were due to surface melting as air temperatures have risen and half were attributed to increased glacier flow, triggered by rising ocean temperatures.