Greenland's rapidly declining ice sheet has long been a source consternation for scientists and climate activists.
Cue the predictable outrage earlier this month when an enterprising start-up began to sell ice cut from the country's shrinking glaciers to exclusive bars in Dubai.
Now, in much worse news, NASA scientists who compared hundreds of thousands of satellite images, believe the world's second-largest body of ice has shrunk by a fifth more than previously estimated.
That could have implications for the ocean currents that regulate temperatures in Europe and North America, which in turn could have far-reaching effects for countries including Australia.
Before: Satellite images of Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier, taken in 1985 and 2022. . After: Researchers say it lost an estimated 88 billion metric tonnes of ice in the period between the two images. (Supplied: NASA/United States Geological Survey). .
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Scientists previously believed Greenland had lost nearly 5 trillion tonnes of ice since the early 1990s.
The new analysis looking at the edges of the ice sheet adds an extra 1 trillion tonnes to that figure.
The study published in the journal Nature found the ice shelf, which makes up 80 per cent of the surface of Greenland, lost an additional 1,034 gigatonnes of mass between 1985 and 2022.
To put that into perspective — a single gigatonne of water is about enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The scientists analysed changes in 207 of Greenland's glaciers, representing 90 per cent of the ice sheet.
Only one grew in size.
Before: A satellite image of the Zacharae Isstrom glacier, taken in 1999. . After: Updated imagery taken in 2022 captures the retreat of the glacier. (Supplied: NASA/United States Geological Survey). .
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The data showed that a glacier in north-east Greenland called Zachariae Isstrom lost the most volume, shedding 160 billion tonnes over the study period.
The Jakobshavn glacier, said to have birthed the iceberg that sunk the Titanic, came in second — losing 88 billion tonnes.
"We know that Greenland has been under a lot of pressure lately and that it's been responding to a much warmer climate, [a] much warmer ocean," said the paper's co-author, Alex Gardner.
"None of that was a surprise.
"But when you synthesise it on a continental scale, it was surprising to see how large that number was," he said.
The study comes more than a year after the same group of researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory doubled previous estimates of ice loss from the much larger Antarctic ice sheet, from 6 to 12 gigatonnes since 1997.
Ocean currents could be impacted
Researchers say that due to the location of many of the glaciers, within deep fjords, losing ice from the edges would not directly affect sea levels.
However, they are warning it could threaten currents that regulate temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, providing Western Europe with a temperate climate.
"When sea ice forms in the Arctic, that very dense, heavy, salty saline water that gets rejected from the formation of the sea ice, it sinks down and it creates a conveyor belt," said Dr Gardner.
"That conveyor belt of water draws warm water from the mid-latitudes in the equator up into the north ... [that is] what keeps Europe warm, and kind of drives the the Gulf Stream to some degree," he said.
"If you increase the amount of fresh water that you're putting into the ocean, [it] sits near the top and it can influence that conveyor belt of ocean circulation."
The Southern Hemisphere is not off the hook.
An Australian study found that the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — which includes the Gulf Stream — could shift the Earth's climate to a more La Niña-like state.
That could spell more flooding rains over eastern Australia and worsen droughts and wildfire seasons over the south-west United States.
If the circulation stops, it could lower temperatures by up to 10 or 15 degrees in Europe, making Edinburgh feel more like Siberia.
Better prediction tools
Despite the gloomy outlook for the planet's ice sheets, there is a silver lining to the analysis.
Thanks to advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the scientists were able to extract the outlines from 236,328 observations of glacier positions in publicly available datasets.
"The ability to provide some prediction in the Earth's system ... that's really challenging," said Dr Gardner.
"[Now] we have a metric we can measure ... with satellites that gives us an indication of what the future response might be.
"We're really being driven by a desire to improve predictions or projections of what the future might hold in a warmer climate."