Trends and Persistence in the Greenland Ice Sheet Mass

• Main Authors: Caporale, Guglielmo Maria, Gil-Alana, Luis Alberiko, Sauci, Laura
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Munich: Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo) 2023
• Subjects: ddc:330; C22; Q54; Greenland ice sheet mass; long memory; fractional integration; persistence; trends; Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/279306

This paper examines trends and persistence in the Greenland ice sheet mass by applying fractional integration methods to a dataset constructed by Mankoff et al. (2020) on ice discharge for seven different regions of Greenland. The adopted empirical framework encompasses a wide range of stochastic processes and is informative about their dynamic and long-run properties. The main finding is that significant changes have occurred in the behaviour of the series of interest in recent years; more specifically, although a deterministic trend is not present, ice discharge in the various regions of Greenland has become a non-stationary, explosive process, with shocks having permanent effects. It appears that, as a result of global warming, the ice mass loss in Greenland has already reached a tipping point and become an irreversible process.