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Greenland's icy reaches are far more vulnerable to warm ocean waters from climate change than had been thought, according to new research by UC Irvine and NASA glaciologists. The work, published today in Nature Geoscience, shows previously uncharted deep valleys stretching for dozens of miles under the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The bedrock canyons sit well below sea level, meaning that as subtropical Atlantic waters hit the fronts of hundreds of glaciers, those edges will erode much further than had been assumed and release far greater amounts of water.
Ice melt from the subcontinent has already accelerated as warmer marine currents have migrated north, but older models predicted that once higher ground was reached in a few years, the ocean-induced melting would halt. Greenland's frozen mass would stop shrinking, and its effect on higher sea waters would be curtailed.
"That turns out to be incorrect. The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated – and for much longer – according to this very different topography we've discovered beneath the ice," said lead author Mathieu Morlighem, a UCI associate project scientist. "This has major implications, because the glacier melt will contribute much more to rising seas around the globe."
To obtain the results, Morlighem developed a breakthrough method that for the first time offers a comprehensive view of Greenland's entire periphery. It's nearly impossible to accurately survey at ground level the subcontinent's rugged, rocky subsurface, which descends as much as 3 miles beneath the thick ice cap.
The worst-case scenario for sea level rise has now become simply the “business-as-usual” scenario, recent studies from NASA make clear. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot, co-author of a new Greenland study, says that, taken together, the new papers “suggest that the globe’s ice sheets will contribute far more to sea level rise than current projections show.”
That means if we don’t reverse carbon pollution emissions trends ASAP, sea level rise will likely be 4 to 5 feet or more by century’s end. Also, the rate of sea level rise in 2100 could be upwards of 1 inch per YEAR!
No one has any concept of how to adapt cities, ports, infrastructure and the like to such a rate of sea level rise. This underscores the New York Times reporting last week that we are risking “enough sea-level rise that many of the world’s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned.”
Last week two studies provided evidence that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun an irreversible process of collapse, in part because its key glaciers are grounded below sea level and are melting from underneath.
Now, a team of researchers from NASA and UC Irvine reports that the Greenland ice sheet has a similar instability:
Greenland’s icy reaches are far more vulnerable to warm ocean waters from climate change than had been thought, according to new research by UC Irvine and NASA glaciologists. The work, published today in Nature Geoscience, shows previously uncharted deep valleys stretching for dozens of miles under the Greenland Ice Sheet.
The bedrock canyons sit well below sea level, meaning that as subtropical Atlantic waters hit the fronts of hundreds of glaciers, those edges will erode much further than had been assumed and release far greater amounts of water.
The name "Greenland" may have been a joke or a real estate ploy by the Vikings but it ain't green. It's one big desolate active glacier. I just finished a true story of the WW2 rescue attempts or marooned fliers and the modern attempt to recover the plane. The plane is estimated to be 200 ft deep in snow pack that turned to ice after 70 + years. That don't sound like a warming trend no matter what the henny penny warmers say.
The current wildfires in Siberia mean more melt in Greenland. Why? More soot on the ice. Siberia is far enough north that soot can blow due east and land on Greenland. China may produce a lot of soot, but it's not far enough north.
Soot isn't really an issue with sea ice, given how so much of the sea ice melts each year, and also gets tumbled about a lot. But the Greenland Ice sheet, that's more stable, so the soot accumulates.
Soot, heat combined to create rare melt in Greenland | Nation/World | ADN.com
