Climate change can be a lot worse if it weren’t for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 p.c of the surplus warmth humanity has pumped into the environment. That warming of the oceans has already been devastating for the organisms that dwell there, nevertheless it’s additionally come again to chew us in a extra surprising method: It’s contributing to the destruction of ice sitting on high of Greenland.

That ailing ice sheet (the bit resting on land) contributed greater than 17 p.c of noticed sea stage rise between 2006 and 2018, and new analysis delivers but extra ominous information. (Greenland has a lot much less ice than Antarctica however is dropping 270 billion tons of it a yr, in comparison with Antarctica’s 150 billion tons.) Greenland’s northern ice cabinets—the ice that floats on the ocean as an alternative of resting on land—have really misplaced greater than a 3rd of their quantity since 1978, because of heat sea water consuming away at their bellies. Three of those northern ice cabinets have utterly collapsed for the reason that yr 2000, and the 5 that stay are quickly deteriorating, in flip destabilizing close by glaciers.

While ice cabinets themselves don’t actually contribute to sea-level rise, since they’re already floating within the ocean, they act like dams to control the quantity of ice discharged into the ocean from the inside of the ice sheet on land. “We see that the ice shelves are getting weaker and weaker and weaker,” says Grenoble Alpes University glaciologist Romain Millan, lead creator of a brand new paper in Nature Communications. “We have observed that in response to this increased melting, the glaciers are retreating, and they are already discharging more ice into the ocean.”

Millan and his colleagues used satellites and modeling to verify a number of elements of the well being of northern Greenland’s ice cabinets. For one, satellite tv for pc imagery allowed them to find out how the entire quantity and space of ice has declined over the many years. More deeply, they have been capable of observe the “grounding line,” the place the ice sheet lifts off land to turn into a floating ice shelf. As tides go out and in, the ice heaves up and down, motion that’s tracked by satellites to pin down the precise location of the grounding strains.

Since ice cabinets are shrinking and getting thinner, these strains are rapidly retreating inland, the place the topography provides nonetheless extra troubles. Moving from the coast inland, the bedslope is retrograde, which means the floor of the bottom beneath the ice will get deeper as you progress towards the middle of the island. “If the grounding line starts to retreat, it may enter an unstoppable retreat because it’s on a retrograde bedslope,” says Millan.

If, in contrast, the slope went up as you traveled inland, it will be more durable for the grounding line to retreat. Imagine how far inland floodwaters can journey if the terrain is flat in comparison with mountainous. “When the grounding moves toward a deeper bed, the amount of ice from the bed to the surface is thicker, which means that the quantity of ice discharged into the ocean is larger,” says Millan. “When moving downward, you are also exposing more ice to a warmer ocean, and consequently more melting, more speedup, more discharge.”