London: About 400 million are likely to be affected by coastal flooding by the end of the century if Greenland ice melt continues at its current rate, scientists have warned. Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than in the 1990s. “As a rule of thumb, for every centimetre rise in global sea level another six million people are exposed to coastal flooding around the planet,” said one of the study authors Andrew Shepherd, Professor at University of Leeds in Britain.
“On current trends, Greenland ice melting will cause 100 million people to be flooded each year by the end of the century, so 400 million in total due to all sea level rise,” Shepherd said.
For the study, a team of 96 polar scientists from 50 international organisations combined 26 separate surveys to compute changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet between 1992 and 2018.
Altogether, data from 11 different satellite missions were used, including measurements of the ice sheet’s changing volume, flow and gravity. The findings showed that Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice since 1992 — enough to push global sea levels up by 10.6 millimetres. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that global sea levels will rise by 60 centimetres by 2100, putting 360 million people at risk of annual coastal flooding. But this new study shows that Greenland’s ice losses are rising faster than expected and are instead tracking the IPCC’s high-end climate warming scenario, which predicts seven centimetres more.
—IANS
