A large volume of ice in northwest Greenland is being battered by ocean tides, scientists said Monday, causing it to shrink and melt, contributing to a new, faster rate of sea level rise.

A team of experts from the University of California and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

Observations from Petermann Glacier show that the glacier’s grounding line — the area where the ice sheet begins to extend to the top of the ocean — can shift significantly as the tides hit each day.

Petermann’s grounding line “shifts between 2 and 6 kilometers (1.2 to 3.7 miles) as the tides hit,” according to Enrico Ciracì, the lead author of the study and a scientist at UCI.

This is an important finding: The common view among scientists was that the grounding line did not shift with the tides – and this points to another important source of melting that could be accelerating sea-level rise.

Between 2016 and 2022, warmer tidal cycles resulted in a 670-foot hole in the glacier’s underside along the ground line — large enough that two Statues of Liberty could be stacked on top of each other inside it .