A chunk of ice the size of lower Manhattan—four miles wide, a mile across, and half a mile thick—broke off of the Helheim Glacier in Greenland and tumbled into the sea a few weeks ago.
When ice that was previously sitting on land, like this piece of the glacier, falls into the ocean and melts, the ocean gets a little fuller. In other words, sea levels rise. (See what the world would look like if all the ice melted.)
This particular chunk of glacier—about 10 billion tons of ice, enough to give every American more than 600 10-pound bags of ice—won't have a noticeable effect on the waves that lap at the beaches in Sydney, Cape Cod, or Honolulu. But when you add up this plus all the other pieces that slough off from both Greenland and West Antarctica each year, the effect adds up: about a millimeter a year, or a few inches over the past 25 years. And the ice sheets shed faster and faster each year.
MORE:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/07/glacier-ice-collapse-greenland/
.
