I met him in Ilulissat, the largest settlement in Greenland, population 3,000. Ilulissat is what many of the scientists on the Greenland Ice Sheet call a safe base for their research. He was presenting to a community gathering on his work at Swiss Camp, the longest continually operating research facility on the ice sheet that…
Work from Leeds, Durham University, the Byrd Polar Research Center and University of California, Irvine, have taken a deeper look into melt lakes forming on the Greenland Ice Sheet. There modeling was for melt lake formation in the melt zone. The “melt zone” is that area around the edge of the ice sheet that melts…
Greenland’s ice mass loss appears to be 22 percent more than 2013 IPCC suggests. The IPCC uses four major outlet glaciers to define Greenland ice mass loss. The most recent evaluation uses 130 glaciers and nearly 100,000 satellite laser altimetry points across Greenland. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of…
The North Atlantic is warming and Greenland’s ice loss has quadrupled in the last 20 years. Warm water is getting under the floating edges of outlet glaciers and causing thinning which in-turn causes the glaciers to speed up. New research has identified another and possibly new dimension to the increase of outlet glacier flow that…
A study in Geophysical Research Letters has found moss beneath a recently melted glacier on Baffin Island that dates back 44,000 to 120,000 years using radiocarbon-14 dating. This technique uses the radioactive decay rate of carbon-14, a rare but predictable version of a normal carbon atom, to date things that were once alive. The radioactive…
Antarctica is shrinking and the rate of melt and ice discharge is accelerating. In the last 20 years an area of ice almost the size of Alaska has been lost. Every ice front on the southern section of the peninsula has been retreating from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes since 1990.This U.S….
