Pakistan, June 12 -- Greenland's ice sheet melted 17 times faster than the past average during a May heatwave that also hit Iceland, the scientific network World Weather Attribution (WWA) said in a report Wednesday.

The Arctic region is on the frontline of global warming, heating up four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979, according to a 2022 study in scientific journal Nature.

"The melting rate of the Greenland ice sheet by, from a preliminary analysis, a factor of 17. means the Greenland ice sheet contribution to sea level rise is higher than it would have otherwise been without this heat wave," one of the authors of the report, Friederike Otto, told reporters.

"Without climate change this would have been impossible,...