Greenland's Ice Cap
These stories about the Arctic ice situation just seem to cluster. I posted on Tuesday about the record low amount of ice cover in the Arctic Ocean. Now there's a story about how the increasing speed of Greenland's glaciers is causing small earthquakes as huge chunks break off.
Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines.
He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."
This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."
The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.
It's looking more and more like the North may have reached a tipping point where one the dreaded feedback mechanisms climate scientists try to warn us all about it already having its way. In this case, the effect results from sea water absorbing far more heat than the highly reflective sea ice. The ocean gets warmer, melts more sea ice, which increases the amount of heat that gets trapped, which warms the ocean, which melts more sea ice, so much that the ice can't recover in the winter and the next summer's cycle starts in a far better position for melting to take place.
All the freshwater from the glaciers in Greenland reduce the ocean's salinity, making it both easier to melt and to freeze, absent the heat absorption effect, but can also trigger a shutdown in that big Atlantic conveyor belt. Not too many people notice what happens in the north since there are so few people living here, but when that happens, everybody will notice, and all these stories point to it happening a lot sooner than most people expect.
Interesting times indeed.
