Greenland has lost more than six trillion metric tons of ice since the 1970s. A new long-term analysis shows that this is primarily due to faster-flowing glaciers, which are transporting more and more ice into the ocean.
For the study, the international IMBIE team compiled 42 datasets from 27 satellite missions. This allows the evolution of the Greenland ice sheet to be traced back to 1972. The study, led by Inès Otosaka of Northumbria University, was published in Scientific Data in September 2026.
Between 1972 and 2023, Greenland lost approximately 6.2 trillion metric tons of ice. About 67 percent of this loss was due to dynamic processes: glaciers flowed faster toward the coast and increasingly released ice into the ocean there. About one-third of the loss resulted from changes at the surface, particularly increased melting and meltwater runoff.
At the same time, ice loss has accelerated sharply. In the 1980s, Greenland lost an average of about 60 billion metric tons of ice per year; by the 2010s, that figure had risen to 264 billion metric tons annually. A striking example of this trend is the Jakobshavn Glacier in West Greenland, whose rapid ice movement has been monitored by satellites for years.
From 2020 to 2023, the average loss did decline to about 199 billion metric tons per year, primarily because there were no extreme melt summers. However, the ice loss caused by glacier movement remained high.
The results thus show that surface melt is not the only decisive factor in Greenland’s contribution to rising sea levels. Equally important is how quickly the large outlet glaciers transport ice from the interior of the island to the ocean.
Heiner Kubny, PolarJournal