Conversion Factors

The official end of the hydrological year in Greenland (1st September to 31st August) means I am rather busy writing reports to give an overview of where the ice sheet is this year and what happened. I will try to write a quick blogpost about this in the next week or so (in case you’re curious here’s a quick plot to show the entire annual SMB, see also: http://polarportal.dk/en/groenlands-indlandsis/nbsp/isens-overflade/)

Anyway, as I find I am constantly switching between Gigatonnes (or indeed Gigatons), cubic kilometres and sea level equivalent, here is a quick and handy guide to converting different units of mass, for my own use as much as anyone else.

1 gigatonne is 1 billion metric tonnes  (or 1 milliard if you like the old British style, that is one thousand million).

However, on the Polar Portal we usually reckon everything in water equivalent. This is to save having to distinguish between snow (with a density between ~100 kg/m3 when freshly fallen and ~350 kg/m3 m when settled after a few days), firn (snow that has survived a full annual cycle with a density up to ~800 kg/m3) and glacier ice (anything from ~850 kg/m3 to 900+). Water has a density (at 4C) of 1000 kg/m3

1 gigatonne of ice will still weigh 1 gigatonne when it is melted but the volume will be lower since ice expands when it freezes.

1 metric tonne of water is 1 cubic metre and 1 billion metric tonnes is 1 km3 (a cubic kilometre of water)

A cubic kilometre of ice does not however weight 1 gigatonne but about 10% less because of the density difference.

100 gigatonnes of water is roughly 0.28mm of sea level rise (on average, note there are big regional differences in how sea level smooths itself out).

Finally, 1 mm sea level rise is 360 Gt of ice (roughly the number of days in a year) 

EDIT: – thanks to ice sheet modeler Frank Pattyn and ice core specialist Tas van Ommen on Twitter for pointing out I’d missed this last handy conversion. Interestingly and probably entirely coincidentally this is very close to the amount of mass lost by the Greenland ice sheet reported by Helm et al., 2014 for the the period January 2011 – January 2014 (pdf here) of 375 +/-24 km3 per year.

Over the last 10 years or so, Greenland has lost on average around 250 Gigatonnes of ice a year (Shepherd et al., 2012), contributing a bit less than a millimetre to global sea level every year with some big interannual variability. This year looks like it will be a comparable number but we will have to wait for the GRACE satellite results in a couple of months to fill in the dynamic component of the mass budget and come up with our final number.

Of course, gigatonnes and cubic kilometres are rather hard to visualise so we have skeptical science to thank for this post that tries. And as aside, Chris Mooney wrote a nice piece in the Washington Post on the difficulties of visualising how much ice is being lost which contains the immortal  line “Antarctica is clearly losing billions of African elephants worth of ice each year”.