Ice loss from Greenland's vast sheet may happen mainly in short bursts, research by Danish scientists suggests. They used aerial photos dating back to the 1980s to plot shrinking of glaciers around the island's northwest coast. In the journal Science, they show that most of the ice loss happened in two periods - 1985-1993 and 2005-10 - with relative stability in between. They say it will be hard to project sea level changes from Greenland ice melt until these patterns are deciphered. A complete melt of the ice sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m, but it could take centuries for this to occur. Last month, Nasa released evidence showing that ice melting had been observed across virtually the whole extent of the Greenland ice sheet, unprecedented in the satellite era Source: The Coming Crisis
