Containing almost 650,000 cubic miles of ice, Greenland’s ice sheet is the second-largest in the world, behind Antarctica. In a study released earlier this month, researchers from SAMS found that Greenland’s ice melt rate is currently faster than it’s been in about 7,000 years.
This latest study goes hand-in-hand with a study published on December 5, led by glaciologist and climate scientist Luke Trusel of Rowan University, who led a team of U.S. and European researchers who analyzed more than three centuries of melt patterns in ice cores from western Greenland.
“Melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet has gone into overdrive. As a result, Greenland melt is adding to sea level more than any time during the last three and a half centuries, if not thousands of years,” Trusel said in a press release from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), one of the institutions involved in the research.
“Greenland is a bit like a sleeping giant that is awakening,” Edward Hanna, a climate scientist at the University of Lincoln, told Inside Climate News this week. “Who knows how it will respond to a couple of more degrees of warming? It could lose a lot of mass very quickly.”
What SAMS researchers found
Ocean physicist Dr. Neil Fraser at the SAMS laboratories at Dunstaffnage, near Oban, created computer models to demonstrate how huge waves below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean are pushing relatively warm water up into Greenland’s fiords, reports The BBC.
The scientific name is “coastally trapped internal waves.” These waves are created by strong winter winds in the northeast Atlantic. Dr. Fraser described it as a “perfect storm scenario,” adding, “These waves are pushing warm water into the fjord and towards the glacier, causing melting hundreds of meters below the ocean surface
The term “relatively warm” is just that. Yes, the waves of water are warm, but in the Arctic winter, this means the temperature of the water is only a few degrees above zero. Dr. Fraser concentrated his work on the Kangerdlugssuaq fjord which drains one of Greenland’s major glaciers.
Kangerlussuaq Fjord is located in Greenland and is the second largest fjord on the southeastern coast of Greenland. In the Greenlandic language, it means “large fiord.” Its waters are fed by the huge Kangerlussuaq Glacier, the largest glacier on the east coast of the Greenland ice sheet.
An undermining of the ice sheet
Oceanographer Dr. Sam Jones used the computer model set up by Dr. Fraser to create animations that accurately replicate the flow of warm water into the fjords and beneath the ice sheet. He built on the work of another SAMS researcher, Professor Mark Inall, whose field studies of the fjord in summertime suggested that the waves could be undermining the ice.
Again, the new SAMS study correlates with a previous study published in May 2017, documenting evidence of waves rippling through Greenland’s Rink Glacier, an outlet glacier to the sea on the island’s west coast. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory study also found that meltwater loss was extensive.
The melting is taking place at a rate of several feet a day during the summer months due to the warm ocean currents sweeping across the glaciers’ surfaces, eroding them from below. NASA was also able to do the first map showing what parts of the bottom of the massive Greenland Ice Sheet are thawed.
SAMS said an estimated 600 gigatonnes of water flowed from Greenland into the ocean in 2012. Greenland now accounts for more than 20 percent of total annual sea level rise.
