Why Does the Greenland Ice Sheet Matter?
The Greenland Ice Sheet blankets 81 percent of Greenland Island. This monstrous ice slab stretches 2,480 kilometers (1,540 miles) long and up to 750 kilometers (465 miles) wide. The ice sheet is so big it would stretch from Key West, Florida, to 100 miles beyond Portland, Maine, covering a swath as wide as from Washington, D.C., to Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s 80 percent as big as the entire United States east of the Mississippi River. It’s not only huge, it’s also thick—an average of 2.3 kilometers (1.6 miles) thick. It contains roughly 8 percent of all of Earth’s fresh water.
