Why China’s new estimate on Greenland ice loss speed is 55% lower than America’s

Chinese researchers have created a new model to convert satellite surface elevation data for the Greenland Ice Sheet into a detailed estimate of how much ice it has lost in recent decades. Using satellite altimetry data covering 2002 to 2023, they found that the ice sheet lost an average of about 120 gigatonnes (264.5 trillion lbs) of mass per year. This figure is considerably lower than the widely cited figure reached by Nasa, which previously estimated Greenland’s annual loss to be nearly 270.

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