From the Washington Post:

“The Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated so fast since the 1990s it is now shedding more than seven times as much ice each year, according to 89 scientists who use satellites to study the area”.

Or if you like numbers:

“The sheet’s total losses nearly doubled each decade, from 33 billion tons per year in the 1990s to an average now of 254 billion tons annually. Since 1992, nearly 4 trillion tons of Greenland ice have entered the ocean, the new analysis found, equivalent to roughly a centimeter of global sea-level rise”.

For fun, let’s pretend the 33 billion tons are the baseline, and consider the now 254 billion tons annually. That’s 221 billion tons per year more than in the 1990s. What does that really mean?

One US ton is 2000 lb, or 907 kg.

If you do the math, today’s excess melt over and above the 1990s level is…

6.4 MILLION KG OF WATER PER SECOND.

That’s just over two Olympic swimming pools per second of extra water in the ocean.

Two more. Two more. Two more. Two more. Two more…

Come back tomorrow at the same time and 550 billion kg of water will have melted away.

Fun times.

[Photo credit: Annie Spratt/Unsplash]