Greenland ice sheet melted beyond point of no return due to climate change, says study

Glaciers on Greenland have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue to melt, according to a study of nearly 40 years of satellite data from the island.

The finding, published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, means that Greenland's glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers. "We've been looking at these remote sensing observations to study how ice discharge and accumulation have varied," said Michalea King, lead author of the study, and a researcher at the Ohio State University in the US. "And what we've found is that the ice that's discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that's accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet," King said.