In East Greenland, a mysterious tsunami hit a military base on a remote island tucked into the fjords. At the same time, seismologists noticed a weird signal on seismic stations located around the world.

In a recent study, researchers treat the entire GNET network as a single instrument weighing the loss of Greenland’s ice.

The metaphor of a “slippery slope” is often invoked for things that might quickly get out of control, but in glaciology these words can be applied more literally. In a warming world, we want to know how quickly ice sheets can melt and raise sea level.