According to OSU School of Earth Sciences Professor Mike Bevis, “Greenland is losing a lot more ice than Antarctica. During the last decade, the rate or speed of Greenland’s ice loss has roughly tripled. Now it seems that this ice loss is becoming more widespread as well.” Bevis was part of an international team of researchers that published a new study on March 16, 2014 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Northeast Greenland is very cold. It used to be considered the last stable part of the Greenland ice sheet,” explained Bevis, who is the principal investigator of the Greenland GPS Network (GNET) . “This study shows that ice loss in the northeast has been accelerating since about 2003. So, it seems that all of the margins of the Greenland ice sheet are unstable now.”

The paper, led by Dr. Abbas Khan at the Danish Technical University, used repeated measurements of ice sheet surface height to document an accelerating loss of ice near three major outlet glaciers in Northeast Greenland. This acceleration was confirmed by independent measurements from the nearby GPS stations of GNET, all of which show accelerating rates of bedrock uplift, manifesting the solid earth’s elastic response to the diminishing ice load.

What particularly worries scientists is the impact on the rest of Greenland, because the northeast's ice stream stretches more than 370 miles into the sub-continent's interior and connects to a huge ice reservoir.

"These new measurements show that the sleeping giant is awakening and suggest -- given likely continued Arctic warming -- that it’s not going back to bed.”, said Jason Box, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

For more information on this topic, you can read some more from Nature Climate, The Columbus Dispatch, or from OSU Research News.