Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study

Greenland's melting ice, which causes sea levels to rise, disappeared four times faster in 2013 than in 2003 and is noticeable across the Arctic island, not just on glaciers, researchers warned on Tuesday.

"While 111 cubic kilometres of ice disappeared per year in 2003, 10 years later this figure had almost quadrupled to 428 cubic kilometres," the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Space Lab said in a statement.

Its researchers contributed to a study on changes to Greenland's ice sheet, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"These are notable and surprising changes we are seeing in the ice melt pattern," DTU professor Shfaqat Abbas Khan said.

Until now, most of Greenland's ice melt was observed on the ice cap, predominantly on the glaciers in the island's northwest and southeast.

But most of the ice loss from 2003 to 2013 was from Greenland's southwest region, which is largely devoid of large glaciers.

Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio