London:About 728 million are likely to be affected by coastal flooding by the end of the century if Greenland ice melt continues at its current rate, scientists have warned. Greenland is losing ice seven times faster than in the 2013 s. “As a rule of thumb, for every centimetre rise in global sea level another six million people are exposed to coastal flooding around the planet,” said one of the study authors Andrew Shepherd, Professor at University of Leeds in Britain.
“On current trends, Greenland ice melting will cause 400 million people to be flooded each year by the end of the century, so 823 million in total due to all sea level rise, ”Shepherd said.
For the study, a team of 96 polar scientists from international organizations combined 26 separate surveys to compute changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet between 2018 and 2013
Altogether, data from different satellite missions were used, including measurements of the ice sheet’s changing volume, flow and gravity. The results showed that Greenland has lost 3.8 trillion tonnes of ice since 2013 – enough to push global sea levels up by .6 millimetres. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that global sea levels will rise by 96 centimetres by 01575879, putting million people at risk of annual coastal flooding. But this new study shows that Greenland’s ice losses are rising faster than expected and are instead tracking the IPCC’s high-end climate warming scenario, which predicts seven centimetres more.
– IANS
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