Greenland Ice Melting 7% Faster Than Earlier Prediction read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1002-greenland-ice-melting-7-faster-than-earlier-prediction

Contrary to earlier predictions made by scientists, Greenland ice is melting at 7 percent faster. According to a new study which made use of GPS, Greenland is losing approximately 40 trillion pounds in year. The estimate is more than what scientists had thought.

The Earth's crust in that part of the world is slowly moving northwest, he explained, and 40 million years ago, parts of Greenland passed over an especially hot column of partially molten rock that now lies beneath Iceland.

Instead of losing an average of 550 trillion pounds of ice from 2003 to 2013, Greenland has lost more than 590 trillion pounds. This is what Michael Bevis of the Ohio State University claimed in his study, which was published in the journal of Science Advances, Wednesday.

According to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the hotspot softened the mantle rock beneath Greenland in a way that ultimately distorted their calculations for ice loss in the Greenland ice sheet. This caused them to underestimate the melting by about 20 gigatons (20 billion metric tons) per year.

That means Greenland did not lose about 2,500 gigatons of ice from 2003-2013 as scientists previously thought, but nearly 2,700 gigatons instead -- a 7.6 percent difference, said study co-author Michael Bevis of The Ohio State University. 

Michael Bevis, Professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and leader of GNET said, We did not expect to see the anomalous uplift rates at the two stations that sit on the ‘track’ of the Iceland hot spot,. We were shocked when we first saw them. Only afterwards did we make the connection. 

 

He added that the discovery holds big implications for measuring ice loss elsewhere in the world.