Ubiquitous acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet calving from 1985 to 2022.

Abstract

Nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades1-4, leading to glacier acceleration, increased rates of sea-level rise and climate impacts around the globe5-9. To understand how calving-front retreat has affected the ice-mass balance of Greenland, we combine 236,328 manually derived and AI-derived observations of glacier terminus positions collected from 1985 to 2022 and generate a 120-m-resolution mask defining the ice-sheet extent every month for nearly four decades. Here we show that, since 1985, the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has lost 5,091 ± 72 km2 of area, corresponding to 1,034 ± 120 Gt of ice lost to retreat. Our results indicate that, by neglecting calving-front retreat, current consensus estimates of ice-sheet mass balance4,9 have underestimated recent mass loss from Greenland by as much as 20%. The mass loss we report has had minimal direct impact on global sea level but is sufficient to affect ocean circulation and the distribution of heat energy around the globe10-12. On seasonal timescales, Greenland loses 193 ± 25 km2 (63 ± 6 Gt) of ice to retreat each year from a maximum extent in May to a minimum between September and October. We find that multidecadal retreat is highly correlated with the magnitude of seasonal advance and retreat of each glacier, meaning that terminus-position variability on seasonal timescales can serve as an indicator of glacier sensitivity to longer-term climate change.