Image: Sarah Das Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Effects
- Planetary Boundaries & Tipping Points
- Extreme weather & event attribution
- ENSO: El Niño & La Niña
- Feedback effects of warming
- Wildfires increasing
- Antarctica melting
- Antarctic sea ice disappearing
- Arctic sea ice disappearing
- Greenland melting
- Ocean currents changing
- Oceans warming
- Ocean acidification
- Melting permafrost & burning ice
- New Zealand’s disappearing glaciers
- Black carbon & ash on snow
- Seasons changing
- How we know about past climates: proxy data
Home > Climate wiki > Effects > Greenland melting
Summary
- Greenland’s ice sheet is the second-largest in the world behind Antarctica, covering 1.71 million km2; ~79% of its surface area. It contains ~10% of the frozen freshwater on Earth, the equivalent of ~6-7m of sea-level rise if it all melted.
- It’s been losing more ice than it gains (from snow) for almost 30 consecutive years. Ice loss contribution to sea level rise doubled (Video 4). It lost 105bn tonnes of ice 2024-25.
The models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict a sea level rise contribution from Greenland of around 10 centimeters by 2100, with a worst-case scenario of 15cm. But that prediction is at odds with what field scientists are witnessing from the ice sheet itself. – Alun Hubbard Professor of Glaciology, University of Tromsø, 2022
Greenland’s glaciers are retreating everywhere and all at once. A comprehensive analysis of satellite data finds that the Greenland ice sheet has lost more ice in the past four decades than previously thought. – Nature 2024 (see also GRL 2024)
Many ice sheet scientists now believe that exceeding even 1.5°C will be sufficient to melt large parts of Greenland. – UNESCO State of the Cryosphere 2024
- The 500m thick Prudhoe Dome ice sheet, which covers ~2,500km2, melted some 7,000 years ago when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer. This implies it could melt suddenly and rapidly in today’s climate, contributing around 75cm to sea level rise.
- Hurricanes are now delivering rain to Greenland, accelerating snow and ice melt, as longer and extreme summer temperatures are accelerating the loss of Arctic sea ice. This is destabilizing the jetstream, resulting in even less snowfall in a feedback effect.
Effects
- Planetary Boundaries & Tipping Points
- Extreme weather & event attribution
- ENSO: El Niño & La Niña
- Feedback effects of warming
- Wildfires increasing
- Antarctica melting
- Antarctic sea ice disappearing
- Arctic sea ice disappearing
- Greenland melting
- Ocean currents changing
- Oceans warming
- Ocean acidification
- Melting permafrost & burning ice
- New Zealand’s disappearing glaciers
- Black carbon & ash on snow
- Seasons changing
- How we know about past climates: proxy data
Home > Climate wiki > Effects > Greenland melting
Summary
- Greenland’s ice sheet is the second-largest in the world behind Antarctica, covering 1.71 million km2; ~79% of its surface area. It contains ~10% of the frozen freshwater on Earth, the equivalent of ~6-7m of sea-level rise if it all melted.
- It’s been losing more ice than it gains (from snow) for almost 30 consecutive years. Ice loss contribution to sea level rise doubled (Video 4). It lost 105bn tonnes of ice 2024-25.
The models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict a sea level rise contribution from Greenland of around 10 centimeters by 2100, with a worst-case scenario of 15cm. But that prediction is at odds with what field scientists are witnessing from the ice sheet itself. – Alun Hubbard Professor of Glaciology, University of Tromsø, 2022
Greenland’s glaciers are retreating everywhere and all at once. A comprehensive analysis of satellite data finds that the Greenland ice sheet has lost more ice in the past four decades than previously thought. – Nature 2024 (see also GRL 2024)
Many ice sheet scientists now believe that exceeding even 1.5°C will be sufficient to melt large parts of Greenland. – UNESCO State of the Cryosphere 2024
- The 500m thick Prudhoe Dome ice sheet, which covers ~2,500km2, melted some 7,000 years ago when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer. This implies it could melt suddenly and rapidly in today’s climate, contributing around 75cm to sea level rise.
- Hurricanes are now delivering rain to Greenland, accelerating snow and ice melt, as longer and extreme summer temperatures are accelerating the loss of Arctic sea ice. This is destabilizing the jetstream, resulting in even less snowfall in a feedback effect.
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Much of the area coloured green along the edges has permanent snow cover (not ice) generally less than 10m thick. The Jakobshavn Isbræ glacier catchment is shown as an overlay in the south Background image: Wikipedia; Jakobshavn (NB, spelling on map is incorrect) glacier catchment drainage area: Cooper et al, 2016).
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The centre of the island is below sea level, largely due to the weight of the ice pushing the crust down into the mantle; this is called ‘isostacy’. Image: NSIDC
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In spite of the ice cap, large areas of the ground beneath the ice sheet have thawed (red). This warming causes the base of the glaciers to thaw, making it easier for them to slide into the ocean. Image: Jessie Allen/ NASA Earth Observatory
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Ice sheet: continental glaciers that have joined together to cover the surrounding land in an area greater than 50,000 km². There are only three in the world: Greenland, and two in Antarctica: the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS). The existence of these ice sheets are why we are still in an ice age.- Marine ice sheet: an ice sheet whose base is on ground below sea level. This makes it particularly vulnerable to undercutting by warming waters.
- Outlet glacier: drains inland glaciers/ice sheets through gaps in the surrounding topography. If an outlet glacier reaches the coast (some terminate inland) it can become an:
- Ice shelf: a tidewater (coastal) glacier or ice sheet that flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface, where it floats.
- Grounding line: the point where the bottom or ‘basal’ (bottom) side of a glacier leaves land and extends out over the ocean.
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In 2008, a year before the 2009 IPCC Report stating that any melting from Greenland would not greatly contribute to sea level rise, a staggering volume of ice on the leading edge (front) of the Jakobshavn Glacier (Map 1) was filmed as it carved spectacularly in just 75 minutes (Video 1).
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4 minute extract from the documentary ‘Chasing Ice’. The footage has not be slowed; the sheer scale of the icebergs breaking off Jakobshavn Glacier, which drains about 40% of Greenland’s icecap (Map 1), gives that impression.
Two years later, a single iceberg 260km² x 213m deep broke off the Petermann Glacier (Map 1). By then, multiple Arctic researchers had been pointing out changes happening across Greenland.
This bottom up melting is occurring as relatively warm water originating from the Irminger Sea near Iceland erodes the underside of ice shelves (in some places over 2km deep), thinning them from below.
Continued undercutting allows more water to travel further under the ice shelf, eroding it and thinning it until it’s detached from the grounding line and the ice begins to float. As the thinning glacier becomes more buoyant, instead of being part of a solid ice mass, it’s forced up and down with the tides. These forces travel up the length of the glacier, ultimately causing the leading edge to break at the weakest point. Because the glacier is thinner at the front, the slope is steeper so the glacier speeds up due to gravity, allowing huge volumes of ice to surge downstream and into the sea (Fig. 1).
- If the grounding line is below sea level, the glacier is prone to undercutting by increasingly warmer ocean waters
- If land slopes down inland instead of rising upwards, warm ocean currents water flow further beneath the glacier, eroding and destabilising it (Fig. 1).
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This illustration is of Thwaites Galcier in Antarctica, however the process is identical in Greenland. The ice is normally stabilized by sitting on the seafloor. As warm ocean currents eat away at the base, the ice thins, lifts away from the seafloor and breaks, losing its ability to act as a brake on the flow of ice from the continent. Click the image for the interactive webpage.
Years before this ‘bottom up’ melting was confirmed, it was known that in summer, meltwater pooled on the surface of glaciers (Fig. 2).
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Image: NASA/Goddard/Maria-José Viña
Thanks to their much lower albedo, these lakes were absorbing more heat than the surrounding ice, causing more warming and hence further melting in a feedback effect. However, it was assumed that the water would refreeze in winter, and any water that fell into crevasses would refreeze. But in 2002, researchers had identified a process by which meltwater lakes on the surface of Jakobshavn Glacier were exploiting crevices in the ice to lubricate the base of the glacier, which explained why it was moving so fast (Fig. 3).
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Image: National Geographic Fact Sheet 2015. Click image to be taken to the website. The processes have been described in more detail in peer-reviewed research (see below) but this fact sheet explains the basics.
The meltwater finds crevasses in the ice, whereupon it drains down moulins (Videos 2 & 3) that it scours out like a drill into the heart of glacier. The image at the top of this page also shows the scale of these moulins.
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‘…kicking off and going bonkers across the West Greenland Ice Sheet, after five days of warm temperatures and intense ablation, an amazing and surreal supraglacial melt system.’ – Alun Hubbard
When this happens on marine glaciers or ice shelves (ie, sitting on the ocean), when the water reaches the base of the ice, the ice shelf is effectively turned into Swiss cheese and rapidly breaks up.
Whereas when this happens to glaciers sitting on land the outcome is different. If the glacier is on land that slopes downhill inland , when the meltwater reaches the bottom of the glacier, it lifts the glacier and/or joins with ocean water that has reached this point, adding to the melting and undercutting from below.
Where the glacier is on land that slopes downhill towards the ocean, the meltwater lubricates the glacier like a water slide, making it flow faster, which in turn opens or widens more crevasses, allowing yet more meltwater lakes to drain, and so on in a feedback effect. When this warm buoyant freshwater reaches the submerged terminus (front) of the glacier, it scours it from below, then shoots hundreds of metres up the terminus. In some instances it erupts at the surface in a churning jaccuzi-like swirl of mud and ice.
Each year since 2015, the (NASA) team has dropped about 250 probes into the ocean around the edge of Greenland. They’ve found the toasty water—up to 10°C or more—nosed up to the end of glaciers around the island most of the time in most of the places…
As they flew low over the leading edge of the massive Helheim glacier, aiming to drop a probe through a hole in the in the mélange of giant bergs floating at the glacier’s snout, they saw water roiling up through the hole “like a bubbling cauldron,” says Willis. When the probe pinged back data, it showed a warm wall of water extending straight down 2,000m to the bottom of the fjord: A solid wall of water ready to melt the glacier. – National Geographic, 2019
Across Greenland, patches of ice are now playing host to soot-coloured algae, which are further reducing the albedo of the ice, leading to further warming. (Fig. 4)
A new model of northwestern Greenland calibrated with satellite observations was able to correct a long-standing bias in the models previously used to inform the IPCC which tend to underestimate the observed mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. The revised model leads to an 8 to 17% greater sea-level rise contribution from this region by 2100. – ICCI, 2025
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More information
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2025:
- A new model of northwestern Greenland calibrated with satellite observations was able to correct a long-standing bias in the models previously used to inform the IPCC which tend to underestimate the observed mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. The revised model leads to an 8 to 17% greater sea-level rise contribution from this region by 2100.
- Crevasses in some of the fastest flowing regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet are getting deeper and larger due to rising air and ocean temperatures. This may increase iceberg production as well as water transfer to the base of the ice sheet, potentially resulting in greater ice loss and sea-level rise.
- Modelling of a controversial geoengineering proposal to install an artificial underwater curtain in the fjord of one of Greenland’s largest glaciers found that this intervention would not prevent further retreat even under low emissions, and comes with a plethora of economic and cultural concerns from local Indigenous People. A further review concluded that such an intervention would severely harm Greenland’s regional fisheries.
- Reference: State of the Cryosphere 2025
2024:
- The Greenland Ice Sheet is currently losing 30 million tons of ice per hour. Ice shelves in northern Greenland have lost 35% of their total volume since 1978, and three ice shelves have now collapsed completely.
- Evidence from ancient soil recovered from beneath the modern-day northwest Greenland shows that the ice sheet retreated at least 200 km inland of its present position when CO2 concentrations of only 280 ppm were sustained for 30,000 years in the past.
- Similar analysis has recently shown that even the central summit of Greenland was ice free within the last 1 million years, implying that at least 90% of Greenland’s ice must have melted at a time when CO2 concentrations were far below even today’s levels – let alone the concentrations towards which humanity is rapidly heading.
- A new model shows that increased melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet will cause Europe to become hotter and drier in coming decades . This is because meltwater pouring from Greenland into the North Atlantic affects the polar jet stream, with periods of rapid melting triggering unusually hot, dry summers that last several years.
- Reference: State of the Cryosphere 2024
2023:
- A new integrated model including the complex interactions between ice sheets, oceans and the atmosphere found that West Antarctica and Greenland will cross irreversible thresholds if global temperatures reach 1.8°C even temporarily, committing these ice sheets to increased ice loss and accelerating sea-level rise for several centuries.
- If the recent observed acceleration of loss in Greenland were to continue, it would track above the upper range predicted by the IPCC (2021) for this decade.
- The frequency and intensity of extreme events is also increasing over Greenland. Rainfall on the Greenland Ice Sheet has grown by a third since 1991, and the frequency of extreme deluges are increasing. Water quickly drains into the ice sheet through vast networks of micro-cracks that may run hundreds of meters deep, carrying surface water to deeper parts of the ice sheet and melting it from within. These extreme melt events may increase sea level rise projections from Greenland by up to 14% over previous worse-case scenarios by the year 2300, contributing as much as 3.74 meters to global sea-level rise.
- Evidence from ancient soil recovered from beneath today’s ice sheet in northwest Greenland shows that 400,000 years ago, the ice sheet retreated over 200km inland, causing at least 1.4m sea-level rise from this section of Greenland alone, when CO2 concentrations were only 280ppm (today it’s more than 420ppm). This warming persisted for 30,000 years.
- Overall: continued improvements in numerical modeling and scientific understanding of ice sheet processes shows that the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets are more sensitive to warming than previously thought, and have the potential, resulting in rapid sea-level rise and at lower global mean temperatures than previously estimated.
- Reference: State of the Cryosphere 2023
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Clean ice and snow have a very high albedo, that is, they reflect up to 90% of solar radiation back into space The ocean is much darker, so it has a very low albedo, reflecting only about 6% of the incoming solar radiation and absorbing the other 94%, warming it much faster than the snow and ice (Fig. 5)As more ice forms, the water is cooler, leading to more ice forming, and so on, in a feedback effect. However,
Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo – Science, 05 Dec. 2024 (Figs. 6 & 7)
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Image: Nathan Kurtz / NASA
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Image: Duspayev et al; Earth’s Sea Ice Radiative Effect from 1980 to 2023
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Image: Eliot Jaboson; data: NASA
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The Arctic is warming 4 times faster than the global average (over the Barents Sea as much as 7 times faster) in part because the positive albedo effect of ice is rapidly diminishing, triggering feedback effects. This is known as ‘Polar Amplification’, and this is changing our weather, which is strongly influenced by jetstreams including the polar vortex. Extreme hot or cold weather is often ‘stuck’ over one place for long periods.
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Glaciers and marine ice sheets that sit on water do not contribute to sea level rise when they melt; they are simply changing from a solid to a liquid while still in the ocean. However, while frozen, this large volume of water is concentrated in relatively small locations (primarily the centre of Greenland, which is below sea level, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, large parts of which sit over ocean). As it melts, the water is re-distributed across all of the world’s oceans.
Ice shelves over water that are anchored to bedrock act as dams or buttresses that hold back the ice sheets that are entirely on the land. As marine ice shelves break up, there is nothing to stop ice sheets on the land from flowing down into the ocean. Along with surface melting this adds to rising sea levels.
Sea levels will actually drop slightly around Greenland and Antarctica if their ice sheets all melt, because the gravitational pull of all that ice mass declines. How much this and other factors contribute to sea levels rising, is covered here.
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- World Glacier Monitoring Service
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