Greenland has gained over 1600km of new coastline as glaciers retreat

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing melting glaciers that once terminated in open ocean to retreat onto land, revealing thousands of kilometres of newly exposed coastline in Greenland and other areas – with potential geopolitical consequences.

Jan Kavan at University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic and his colleagues used satellite imagery from 2000 and 2020 to track changes to marine-terminating glaciers across the northern hemisphere. They found that almost 2500 kilometres of new coastline has emerged in this time as glaciers have…