At the top of the world, northern Greenland’s huge glaciers — long thought to be relatively stable — are in trouble, a new study shows.
As the ocean warms, Greenland’s last remaining ice shelves are rapidly weakening, destabilizing the nearby glaciers and threatening potentially “dramatic” consequences for sea level rise, according to the study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
Ice shelves are tongues of floating ice that jut out over the ocean and act as dams that hold back glaciers on land and slow ice loss. When they melt and weaken, more of the land-based ice is able to slide into the ocean, adding to sea level rise.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At the top of the world, northern Greenland’s huge glaciers — long thought to be relatively stable — are in trouble, a new study shows.
As the ocean warms, Greenland’s last remaining ice shelves are rapidly weakening, destabilizing the nearby glaciers and threatening potentially “dramatic” consequences for sea level rise, according to the study published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
“These glaciers are among the most important of the ice sheet,” Romain Millan, a glaciologist at the Grenoble Alpes University in France and an author of the study, told CNN.
Millan and his co-authors used thousands of satellite images, along with climate models and measurements from the field, to better understand the drivers for — and timing of — historical and current changes to the ice shelves.
The report calls for continued monitoring to better asses how the ice shelves will respond to climate change and, in particular, to build on the study’s findings about the complex process of basal melting and the potential impacts on sea level rise.
“We knew that ice shelf basal melting is related to ocean temperature, but what is neat about this study is that it gives a better idea about the timing and magnitude of the change.”
The original article contains 905 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“Iceland is green, Greenland is icy.” Oh, shit, it’s also the biggest island that’s not a continent.
