The conference also mentioned these facts on sea level rise: According to the United Nations' Ocean Conference held in 2017, more than 600 million people, or about 10 percent of the world’s population, live in coastal areas that are less than 10 meters (33 feet) above sea level. Worldwide, more than 100 million people currently live within 1 meter (3.3 feet) of average sea level. While calving or disintegrating ice shelves do not raise ocean levels, the resulting glacier acceleration does, and this poses a potential threat to coastal communities around the globe. Similar losses of ice tongues in Greenland have caused speed-ups of two to three times the flow rate in just one year. After the 2002 Larsen B Ice Shelf disintegration, nearby glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula accelerated up to eight times their original speed over the next 18 months.

Without a shelf to slow its speed, the glacier accelerates. Higher temperatures can destabilize this system by increasing glacier flow speed and-more dramatically-by disintegrating the ice shelf. The blue arrows indicate subglacial water, which upwells and rises along the terminus face carrying sediment and nutrients (brown arrows). The black arrow indicates that dynamic changes of outlet glaciers are more pronounced toward the glacier terminus (ending in ocean). The red arrow indicates the ocean heat beneath the ice shelf. This conceptual diagram of an outlet glacier and its ice shelf shows the various processes at play where the atmosphere, ice, and ocean interact. The other kind is disintegration, a newly recognized phenomenon associated with climate change. One kind is iceberg calving, a natural event. Two types of events occurring on ice shelves have attracted the attention of scientists. Together, an ice shelf and the glaciers feeding it can form a stable system, with the forces of outflow and back pressure balanced. However, there are two other ways ice shelves form: sea ice and local snowfall can form an ice shelf, and ice shelves can form out of a composite of glacier and fast ice, which is sea ice that attaches to a coastline. Snow falls on a glacier, adding mass to the glacier, which pushes further out to the ocean. Glaciers flow under their own weight out to a coastline and onto the ocean surface, pushing and feeding an ice shelf. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) How do ice shelves form? The height of the Antarctica's largest ice shelf, the Ross Ice Shelf, looms in the background with sea ice spreading in front.

Exchange for Observations and Local Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA).

NASA National Snow and Ice Data Center Distributed Active Archive Center (NSIDC DAAC).

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and around 79% of its surface is covered in ice.

The GEUS researchers have been tracking the loss of ice in the area, using optical satellite imagery. has really picked up these last couple of years.” “The ice that has broken off is just under … twice the size of Manhattan. “These last two summers have been exceptionally warm,” Box said, speaking to CNN Monday. “We should be very concerned about what appears to be progressive disintegration at the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf, because upstream … is the only major Greenland ice sheet ice stream,” said Jason Box from The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) in a statement on Monday. The territory’s ice sheet is the second biggest in the world behind Antarctica’s, and its annual melt contributes more than a millimeter rise to sea levels every year. A 44-square-mile chunk of ice, about twice the size of Manhattan, has broken off the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf in northeast Greenland in the last two years, leaving scientists fearful over its rapid disintegration.

Ice shelf breaking off