Greenland ice sheet lost half-a-trillion tonnes

Greenland's massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to findings released Thursday.

That is equivalent to an additional three million tonnes of water streaming into global oceans every day, or six Olympic pools every second.

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Crumbling glaciers and torrents of melt-water slicing through Greenland's two-to-three-kilometre thick ice block were the single biggest source of global sea level rise in 2019, accounted for 40 percent of the total, or 1.5 millimetres, researchers reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Last year's loss of mass was at least 15 percent above the previous record in 2012, but even more alarming are the long-term trends, they said.

If all of Greenland's ice sheet were to melt, it would lift global oceans by seven metres (23 feet).

Even a more modest rise of a couple of metres would redraw the world's coastlines and render land occupied today by hundreds of millions of people uninhabitable. 

A study in the same journal last week concluded that the Greenland's ice sheet has passed a "tipping point", and is now doomed to disintegrate, though on what time scale is unknown.