Greenland Ice Sheet

The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest body of ice on Earth after the Antarctic ice sheet, covering about 1,710,000 square kilometers, roughly 80 percent of Greenland's surface, and stretching some 2,900 kilometers north to south with an average thickness of 1,673 meters and a maximum depth beyond 3,488 meters. The ice began forming as a continuous mass around 2.6 million years ago, and its oldest preserved ice is roughly a million years old. It is now losing mass faster than at any point in at least 12,000 years, melting two to five times faster than before 1850, and its complete loss would raise global sea levels by about 7.4 meters.