The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is speeding year by year, according to global climate watchers gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island. The consequence is already evident in a small but ominous rise in sea levels around the world, a pace that is also accelerating, the scientists say. According to the scientists’ data, Greenland’s ice is melting at a rate three times faster than it was only five years ago. The estimate of the melting trend that has been observed for nearly a decade comes from a University of Texas team monitoring a satellite mission that measures changes in the Earth’s gravity over the entire Greenland ice cap as the ice melts and the water flows down into the Arctic ocean. ‘We have only been watching the ice cap melt during a relatively short period,’ physicist Jianli Chen said Thursday, ‘but we are seeing the strongest evidence of it yet, and in the near future the pace of melting will accelerate even more.’ The same satellites tracking Greenland’s ice cap […]