Glaciers are mostly made of water. Sometimes, perhaps more than we’d like, some of that water makes a break for it by melting, the inconstant molecule… It might pootle around on the surface of the glacier a bit and get a lot of remote sensers very excited, but it’s what it does once it gets to the base of the glacier that really matters for the behaviour and flow of the ice. So, in 2000 word ...[Read More]
Water plumes are tickling the Greenland Ice Sheet
Figure 1. Cross section of a schematic representation of a glacier. Surface water is penetrating into the glacier through crevasses at its surface, reaching its base where it flows towards the ocean. Once this freshwater has entered the ocean, it rises up creating a so-called water plume. Credit: Stefan Hollenbach.
7 meters of sea-level rise – what you would get if the whole Greenland Ice Sheet melted. But the tricky question is: how much of this ice will be melted in the next decades, and how fast will it occur? This piece of information is critical in order to plan for present and future populations living in coastline areas, all around the world. How much and how fast can the Greenland Ice Sheet melt ? In ...[Read More]
Image of The Week – Plumes of water melting Greenland’s tidewater glaciers
Loss of ice from The Greenland Ice Sheet currently contributes approximately 1 mm/year to global sea level (Enderlin et al., 2014). The most rapidly changing and fastest flowing parts of the ice sheet are tidewater glaciers, which transport ice from the interior of the ice sheet directly into the ocean. In order to better predict how Greenland will contribute to future sea level we need to know mo ...[Read More]