Measuring impact of climate change from space: Gravity measurements shed light on key questions
Thursday, December 10, 2009 - 20:07
in Earth & Climate
What is the impact of climate change on the ice-covered regions of Earth? How does deglaciation affect global sea level changes? These questions are being addressed by scientists from Germany and Australia, who are investigating space-borne gravity measurements provided by the GRACE satellite mission. As a result, they found out that the Greenland glaciers shrunk continuously in the last few years; above all, they estimated the changes not to be linear in time but accelerating. On average, recent Greenland ice-mass decline caused an annual sea-level rise of about 0.5 millimeters.