Greenland is shrinking and drifting further northwest, geoscientists have discovered after analyzing satellite data.
The world’s largest island—at 2,175,600 square kilometers—Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark and is home to just over 50,000 people.
It lies between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, with some 1.8 million square kilometers of the country covered by theGreenlandic ice sheet—and it is this sheet, or rather its loss, that is sending Greenland on the move.
The ice sheet’s melting is reducing pressure on the subsurface, causing movements in the bedrock and tectonic plates belowand causing Greenland to drift northwest.
In the past 20 years, the island has drifted by about two centimeters each year, and the island itself is both expanding and contracting: stretching out in some regions, and becoming compressed in others.
Paper author and geodesist Danjal Longfors Berg of the Technical University of Denmark said in a statement that the assumption until now is that Greenland was primarily being stretched, “due to the dynamics triggered by the ice melting in recent years.
“But to our surprise, we also found large areas where Greenland is being ‘pulled together,’ or ‘shrinking,’ due to the movements.”
In their study, the researchers analyzed measurements from 58 GPS stations around Greenland to show elevation changes and changes in the island’s overall position. It is the first time that these movements have been described in such detail.
Researchers succeeded in creating a model that shows Greenland’s movements from about 26,000 years ago to the present, along with precise measurements from the past 20 years, as accelerating climate change affects the Arctic.
Berg added in a statement: “It’s important to understand the movements of landmasses. They are, of course, interesting for geoscience.
“But they are also crucial for surveying and navigation, since even the fixed reference points in Greenland are slowly shifting.”
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Reference
Berg, D. L., Adhikari, S., Hassan, J., Steffen, R., Steffen, H., Willis, M., & Khan, S. A. (2025). Estimation and Attribution of Horizontal Land Motion Measured by the Greenland GNSS Network. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 130(9). https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB030847