A massive glacier in northeast Greenland has dramatically melted in the past decade and would raise global sea levels by a foot and a half if it thawed completely, according to a study published Thursday.

It was a "surprise" to learn how fast the large chunk of ice was shrinking, Jeremie Mouginot, lead scientist of the report, told USA TODAY in an email.

The glacier holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than 18 inches if it were to melt away to nothing, but no timetable exists for how long that process could take, according to the study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

"The glacier has profoundly transformed in only 10 years," Mouginot, of the University of California, Irvine, said. "The glacier is now breaking up and calving high volumes of icebergs into the ocean, which will result in rising sea levels for decades to come.

Humans are flirting with human caused runaway global warming. Lets hope we haven't crossed the end game scenario yet and still have time to keep warming within the 1.5 degrees of heating.

If the glacier has shrunk of course the growth will be above average if measured in percent mass or volume because the denominator is smaller in the equation as the glacier shrinks.

If a glacier shrinks by 10% and then grows by 10% it will have lost 1% [0.99 = 10 x 0.9 x 1.1]. The effect is cumulative with time.

Sun Tzu wrote on Nov 13^th, 2015 at 12:28pm:



Quite correct. But the increasing ice mass is for all of Greenland, not just the glacier.

Actually, an error in my calculation. It should have been:

[0.99 = 1 x 0.9 x 1.1]

n Eskimo's freezers?

Large swathes of the northern hemisphere, home to some 2 billion people, could suffer increasing water shortages due to shrinking snowpacks, researchers said on Thursday.

Data shows reduced snowpacks - the seasonal accumulation of snow - will likely imperil water supplies by 2060 in regions from California's farmlands to war-torn areas of the Middle East, according to a team of scientists in the United States and Europe.

In total, nearly a hundred water basins dependent on snow across the northern hemisphere run the chance of decline.

"Water managers in a lot of places may need to prepare for a world where the snow reservoir no longer exists," said Justin Mankin, the study's lead author and a researcher at Columbia University's Earth Institute in New York, in a statement.

Basins in northern and central California, the Ebro-Duero basin in Portugal, Spain and southern France and the Shatt al-Arab basin affecting much of the Middle East including Iraq and Syria count among those most sensitive to changes, the study shows.

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In these areas, global warming is disrupting snow accumulation, which acts as a seasonal source of water when it melts, the researchers said.

Still, across most of North America, northern Europe, Russia, China and southeast Asia, rainfall is projected to continue meeting demand, according to the study published in the online journal Environmental Research Letters.

Earlier this year, amid a devastating drought in California, U.S. authorities reported that a dry, mild winter had left the country's Western mountain snowpack at record low levels.

World leaders will meet in Paris starting this month in a bid to agree on ways to reduce the effects of climate change.

(Reporting by Sebastien Malo, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)