The Steenstrup Glacier was once considered one of Greenland’s most stable glaciers, but now it is rapidly disappearing.
The Steenstrup Glacier is the largest and widest glacier in the Lauge Koch Coast, Melville Bay. It originates on the western side of the Greenland ice sheet and flows westwards between the Dietrichson Glacier to the north and the Kjer Glacier to the south.
The glacier is classified as a tidewater glacier, meaning it is a glacier that terminates in the sea where it can discharge icebergs into the ocean through calving.
Prior to 2018, the glacier had experienced almost no changes at all for decades. But between 2018 and 2021, it retreated inland by nearly 4.5 miles.
During this time, the amount of ice pouring off the glacier into the ocean doubled. By 2021, it was losing more than 6 billion tons of ice per year, launching it into the top 10 percent of ice-losing glaciers in Greenland.
Researchers at The Ohio State University found that even long-term stable glaciers are susceptible to sudden and rapid retreat as warmer waters begin to intrude and influence new environments.
Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications on April 19, 2023.
Many glaciologists believe that this recent uptick in ice discharge can be explained by the intrusion of warming waters that are being swept from the Atlantic into Greenlandic fjords — critical oceanic gateways that can impact the stability of local glaciers and the health of polar ecosystems.
The research team chose the Steenstrup Glacier, officially known as K.I.V Steenstrups Nordre Bræ, to test that theory.
“Up until 2016, there was nothing to suggest Steenstrup was in any way interesting,” said Thomas Chudley, lead author of the study, who completed this work as a research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Chudley is now a Leverhulme research fellow at Durham University in the UK.
“There were plenty of other glaciers in Greenland that had retreated dramatically since the 1990s and increased their contribution to sea level rise, but this really wasn’t one of them.”
As far as scientists knew, Steenstrup had not only been stable for decades but was generally insensitive to the rising temperatures that had destabilized so many other regional glaciers, likely because of its isolated position in shallow waters.
But Chudley and the team dug further, studying observational and modeling data from previous remote sensing analyses on the glacier. The team discovered Steenstrup was likely experiencing melt due to anomalies in deeper Atlantic water.
“Our current working hypothesis is that ocean temperatures have forced this retreat,” Chudley said. “The fact that the glacier’s velocity has quadrupled in just a few years opens up new questions about how fast large ice masses can really respond to climate change.”
Understanding more about these interactions could provide key insight into how glaciers thrive in other locations around the world and even become an indicator of how these environments might change in the future.
“What’s happening in Greenland right now is kind of the canary in the coal mine of what might happen in West Antarctica over the next few centuries,” Chudley said. “So it would be great to be able to get into the fjord with real on-the-ground observations and see how and why Steenstrup has changed.”
