How Greenland would look without its ice sheet

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42260580

How Greenland would look without its ice sheet

By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent, New Orleans
• 8 hours ago

Scientists have produced a stunning visualisation of Greenland – without its ice cover. It is made from decades of survey data that show the position and shape of the territory’s bedrock, and the surrounding seafloor. This is critical information needed to understand how the huge island might respond to a warming world.

Were all the ice on Greenland to melt, it would raise global sea-levels by 7.42m (24.34ft). This is one of the refined statistics to come out of the new compilation of data. It is a simple calculation: if you know the elevation of the top of the ice sheet and you subtract from that the height of the bedrock - you get a volume: 2.9 million cubic km.
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Greenland is currently losing about 260 billion tonnes of ice to the ocean every year. It sounds a lot - and it is, but no-one is expecting an immediate collapse - not for centuries, at least. Nonetheless, some of the answers as to how fast changes may come will be in this map's data.
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The colourful map is being distributed here at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary scientists. It is a dramatic rendering of an initiative called BedMachine which has sought to pull together everything we know about what lies under and around the giant ice sheet.

Scientists working on this project published a summary of their findings in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters last month, and now the British Antarctic Survey's (BAS) mapping department, at the request of Prof Bamber, has put the data in a visually understandable form.
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