As Congress concludes its work on the “Inflation Reduction Act,” with its arrays of decarbonization and clean industry programs, a note from NASA’s climate program at Caltech:
“The mass of the Greenland ice sheet has rapidly declined in the last several years due to surface melting and iceberg calving. Research based on observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites (2002-2017) and GRACE Follow-On (since 2018) indicates that between 2002 and 2021, Greenland shed approximately 280 gigatons of ice per year, causing global sea level to rise by 0.03 inches (0.8 millimeters) per year.”
How much water is this exactly? According to a rough estimate published by the U.S. Geological Survey, the world’s store of fresh water — all the glaciers, ice sheets, lakes, rivers, and groundwater combined — is about 40 million cubic kilometers by volume. About three fifths of this, or 24.7 cubic kms, is locked up in the 30-million-year-old Antarctic ice sheets. Ground water adds 12 million cubic kms. Greenland’s ice sheet — about 2.7 million years old and averaging a mile in height — holds about 2.9 million cubic kms. By volume and height, this makes the ice sheet something like the Mediterranean Sea suspended a few feet above the Arctic Ocean. Alternatively, Greenland holds about 15 times as much fresh water as the 0.2 million cubic kms of liquid in all the picturesque and historic lakes, rivers, and mountain glaciers of the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and smaller islands combined.
How much, then, is 280 gigatons of ice? By one comparison, converted into liquid this would be about half the 530 gigatons of water flowing down the Mississippi River each year. By another, given that by arithmetic the Greenland ice sheet weighs about 2.9 quadrillion tons, losing 280 billion tons means that about 0.01% of it, or one ten-thousandth, is melting off each year. This is likely to accelerate: A recent survey published by the National Academy of Sciences estimates that expected warming through 2100 is likely to melt enough of it to raise sea levels by one meter, implying loss of about an eighth of the ice sheet or twice the above-ground fresh water outside Antarctica. Melting all of it would raise sea levels by about 24 feet, and require about 1000 years under current climate-change trajectory.* So, Congress’ action this week is perhaps not very timely, but it is also not too late.
* The presumably less likely case of an Antarctic ice-sheet melt would raise the seas by 190 feet.
Flight
NASA’s GRACE project at Caltech monitors Greenland ice sheet melt rates.
Danish research program EastGrip is a 30-person team investigating the behavior of the ice sheet through radar, drilling for ice cores to a depth of 2500 meters (1.5 miles), and surface observations to understand past climate effects on ice sheets, chemical content at various levels, melting and internal ice flows, etc.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on likely future melting trends.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center’s “Greenland Ice Sheet Today” bulletin shows surface melting at “moderate” levels compared to 2020 and 2021, principally along the western/southern coastal strip with some on the far northern coast.
… and also from the NSIDC, a look at adaptation in southern Greenland polar bear populations.
And the U.S. Geological Survey counts the world’s fresh water.
Policy:
The Senate Democratic Caucus summarizes the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy and climate change provisions.
The White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy announces Arctic policies.
And more about Greenland:
The world’s largest island and undisputed fresh-water superpower is roughly one-fifth the size of the United States, and 80% covered by ice. About 56,000 people — 6,000 Danes, 50,000 Inuit — live on the actually “green” bits. Administered by Denmark since 1721, in constitutional terms Greenland is a politically autonomous kingdom under the Danish monarchy, with a right in theory to declare independence. The odd interlude in which the Trump administration suddenly proposed to “buy” it four years ago rested on a complex set of concerns about access to potentially large mineral lodes (Greenland is thought to be home to an array of rare-earth metals useful in clean-energy manufacturing but potentially damaging to mine, as well as messy to mine; also gold, silver, zinc, tantalum, etc.) along with concerns about Arctic sea lanes and intelligence surveillance. For now, Greenland’s main industry is about $1 billion in cold-water fisheries for snow crab, cold-water shrimp, turbot, halibut, and other northern catch.
The Greenland government’s page, evidently only in Greenlandic (an Inuit language) and Danish.
Denmark reviews mineral resources.
U.S. policy, via the Embassy in Copenhagen.
The NYT looks at metal ores and mining.
…while NPR catalogues big-power interests and motives in the far north.
Perspective from the Inuit Circumpolar Council, with indigenous reps. from the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Finland, and (still) Russia.
And the 10-day weather report for Nuuk (50°F and wet all week).
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
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