Submarine Melt

Water plumes are tickling the Greenland Ice Sheet

Johanna Beckmann January 31, 2020

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 — Cavity leads to complexity

David Docquier April 19, 2019

A 10km-long, 4-km-wide and 350m-high cavity has recently been discovered under one of the fastest-flowing glaciers in Antarctica using different airborne and satellite techniques (see this press release and this study). This enormous cavity previously contained 14 billion tons of ice and formed between 2011 and 2016. This indicates that the bottom of the big glaciers on Earth can melt faster tha ...[Read More]

Image of The Week – Plumes of water melting Greenland’s tidewater glaciers

Donald Slater October 28, 2016

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]