Precipitation drives western Patagonian glacier variability and may curb future ice mass loss.

Two-thirds of all glaciers worldwide are projected to disappear by 2100 CE. Large uncertainties however remain in maritime settings, where some glaciers have recently gained mass in response to increased snowfall. One of these regions is southern Patagonia, where increased precipitation since the 1980s seems to have attenuated glacier retreat.

Ubiquitous acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet calving from 1985 to 2022.

Nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades, leading to glacier acceleration, increased rates of sea-level rise and climate impacts around the globe. To understand how calving-front retreat has affected the ice-mass balance of Greenland, we combine 236,328 manually derived and AI-derived observations of glacier terminus positions collected from 1985 to 2022 and generate a 120-m-resolution mask defining the ice-sheet extent every month for nearly four decades. Here we show that, since 1985, the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has lost 5,091 ± 72 km of area, corresponding to 1,034 ± 120 Gt of ice lost to retreat.

Rate of mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet will exceed Holocene values this century.

The Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) is losing mass at a high rate. Given the short-term nature of the observational record, it is difficult to assess the historical importance of this mass-loss trend. Unlike records of greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature, in which observations have been merged with palaeoclimate datasets, there are no comparably long records for rates of GIS mass change.