Greenland's Helheim glacier is flowing 10.5 kilometers per year = 80,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools

Scientists say the Greenland ice sheet, which is up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick and covers an area almost the size of Mexico, is losing about 7 billion cubic feet (200 million cubic meters) of ice a year — the equivalent of 80,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

That means snowfall on top of the ice sheet is not enough to replace what is lost through surface melting and ice chucked out in the fjords by faster-flowing glaciers. In the process, sea levels rise as towering icebergs plunge into the Atlantic Ocean and displace water — much like an ice cube dropped into a drink.

The dynamics of the ice sheet on Greenland — and the much larger ones on Antarctica — were not included in sea level rise projections by the U.N. expert panel on climate change in 2007 because the phenomenon was poorly mapped at the time.

The most popular explanation is that the patient — Greenland's ice sheet — contracted its ailment not from warmer air, but a warmer ocean. In July, the world's oceans were the warmest in almost 130 years of record-keeping.

SHOOT: More and more I read about scientists who predicted these changes to take hundreds of years, and saw no definite anthropomorphic link suddenly catching a wake up as changes now race through their data... A glacier moving at a almost 11km per year, that's a helluva lot, and helluva fast. Glaciers in the Alps, measured by Agassiz in 1847, moved at an average speed of 100 metres per year [down the slopes of high mountains!].

"It's a little embarrassing to know so little," says Ian Howat, a glaciologist based at Ohio State University. "We won't know it's going until it's gone. It feels like that a little bit."

clipped from news.yahoo.com HELHEIM GLACIER, Greenland – Suddenly and without warning, the gigantic river of ice sped up, causing it to spit icebergs ever faster into the ocean off southeastern Greenland. Helheim Glacier nearly doubled its speed in just a few years, flowing through a rift in the barren coastal mountains at a stunning 100 feet (30 meters) per day. Alarm bells rang as the pattern was repeated by glaciers across Greenland: Was the island's vast ice sheet, a frozen water reservoir that could raise the sea level 20 feet if disgorged, in danger of collapse? Half a decade later, there's a little bit of good news — and a lot of uncertainty. "It does seem that the very rapid speeds were only sustained for a short period of time although none of these glaciers have returned to the 'normal' flow speeds yet," says Gordon Hamilton, a glaciologist from the University of Maine, who's clocked Helheim's rapid advance using GPS receivers on site since 2005.