Greenland Rising

Greenland appears to be floating upwards – its landmass is rising up to 4 centimetres each year, scientists reveal.

And the large country's new-found buoyancy is a symptom of Greenland's shrinking ice cap, they add.

"The Earth is elastic and if you put a load on top of it, then the surface will move down; if you remove the load, then the surface will start rising again," explains Shfaqat Khan of the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen.

In the case of Greenland, the "load" is its ice cap, he says.

Such uplift is not an unknown phenomenon. Relic "raised beaches" are relatively common in some areas, where the loss of ice after the last Ice Age caused the land to rise, leaving beaches often metres above the water.

Khan and his team detected the country's uplift using measurements from GPS stations located on the bedrock, underneath the ice.

Khan and his colleagues have been monitoring data from these stations since 2001 and have found that the southeastern tip of the country is definitely rising upwards. They have also found that the rate of rise has dramatically accelerated in recent years.

Well, at least greenland will stay above the water. 4 cm/year is pretty darn fast.