Tag: Greenland

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has stated that its Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project is revealing new details about thinning of the Greenland polar icecap. In particular, OMG observations have been depicted in two new research papers in order to document how meltwater and ocean currents are interacting along Greenland's west coast and to improve seafloor maps used to predict future melting and subsequent sea level rise.

  Studying sea ice in the Fram Strait, a passage between Greenland and Svalbard that is the main gateway for Arctic sea ice into the open ocean, is not easy. In this area, not only does ice flow southward quickly – at the same time, warmer ocean waters melt and thin it from below, making it easier for waves to break the ice into smaller floes. This dynamic, unstable environment makes it hard for scientists to set camps on the sea ice and collect direct measurements. In turn, scarce field data means that remote measurements of sea ice in the Fram Strait have few sources of validation. Enter the collaboration between an expedition led by the Norwegian Polar Institute, called the Norwegian Young Sea Ice Cruise (N-ICE2015), and Operation IceBridge, NASA's biannual airborne survey of polar sea and land ice. The players: at sea, a Norwegian research vessel, the R/V Lance, locked into the sea ice pack, quickly drifting along with it. In the sky, NASA's C-130 aircraft, loaded with radar and laser instruments. The objective, which was accomplished during Operation IceBridge's March 19 inaugural flight of the 2015 Arctic campaign, was for the C-130 to overfly a survey field ...

A team of scientists lead by Danish geologist Nicolaj Krog Larsen have managed to quantify how the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to a warm period 8,000-5,000 years ago. Back then temperatures were 2-4 degrees C warmer than present. Their results have just been published in the scientific journal Geology, and are important as we are rapidly closing in on similar temperatures. While the world is preparing for a rising global sea-level, a group of scientists led by Dr. Nicolaj Krog Larsen, Aarhus University in Denmark and Professor Kurt Kjær, Natural History Museum of Denmark ventured off to Greenland to investigate how fast the Greenland Ice Sheet reacted to past warming. With hard work and high spirits the scientists spent six summers coring lakes in the ice free land surrounding the ice sheet. The lakes act as a valuable archive as they store glacial meltwater sediments in periods where the ice is advanced. That way is possible to study and precisely date periods in time when the ice was smaller than present. "It has been hard work getting all these lake cores home, but is has definitely been worth the effort. Finally we are able to describe the ice sheet's response ...

Melting of glacial ice will probably raise sea level around the globe, but how fast this melting will happen is uncertain. In the case of the Greenland Ice Sheet, the more temperatures increase, the faster the ice will melt, according to computer model experiments by Penn State geoscientists. "Although lots of people have thought about sea level rise from the ice sheets, we don't really know how fast that will happen," said Patrick Applegate, research associate, Penn State's Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. If all the ice in the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, global sea level would rise by about 24 feet. In the last 100 years, sea level in the New York City area has only increased by about one foot. However, storm surges from hurricanes stack on top of this long-term increase, so sea level rise will allow future hurricanes to flood places where people are not ready for or used to flooding. A vivid example occurred during Hurricane Sandy when parts of the New York City subway tunnel system flooded. Greenland might be especially vulnerable to melting because that area of the Earth sees about 50 percent more warming than the global average. Arctic sea ice, when ...

Some of the increased melting at the surface of the ice sheet is due to a warmer atmosphere, but the ocean's role in driving ice loss largely remains a mystery

Need for continuous satellite monitoring of ice-sheets

GPS Reveals An unusually hot melting season in 2010 accelerated ice loss in southern Greenland by 100 billion tons -- and large portions of the island's bedrock rose an additional quarter of an inch in response.That's the finding from a network of nearly 50 GPS stations planted along the Greenland coast to measure the bedrock's natural response to the ever-diminishing weight of ice above it.Every year as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, the rocky coast rises, explained Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. Some GPS stations around Greenland routinely detect uplift of 15 mm (0.59 inches) or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period -- as high as 20 mm (0.79 inches) in some locations.In a presentation December 9 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Bevis described the study's implications for climate change."Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we'll experience pulses of extra sea level rise," he said. "The process is not really a steady process."Because the solid earth is elastic, Bevis and his team can use ...

Oil spill plan for its deepwater drilling in the Arctic Following criticism by Greenpeace, Greenland's government on Monday decided to release Cairn Energy PLC's oil spill plan for its deepwater drilling in the Arctic.Greenland's government published the Scottish oil company's contingency plan on website , saying it had listened into the public's wish for such information.Joern Skov Nielsen, deputy minister at Greenland's Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum, said the document contains plans on how to deal with potential oil spills of all sizes and icebergs and other threats in the Arctic waters."One of the worst cases they are looking into is a 5,000 barrel-a-day spill, and the oil spill plan certainly demonstrates that they can handle more than the double of that within the resources described in the plan," Skov Nielsen said at a conference call. He said Cairn's cooperation in a global oil spill network means the company can handle "much larger spills than that."Greenpeace has said oil drilling presents a threat to the fragile Arctic environment and criticized Cairn for not taking the extra precautions needed to avoid accidents such as the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP's well spewed out up to 57,000 ...

Than expected during last interglacial, according to new results During the last prolonged warm spell on Earth, the oceans were at least four meters - and possibly as much as 6.5 meters, or about 20 feet - higher than they are now.Where did all that extra water come from? Mainly from melting ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, and many scientists, including University of Wisconsin-Madison geoscience assistant professor Anders Carlson, have expected that Greenland was the main culprit.But Carlson's new results, published July 29 in Science, are challenging that assertion, revealing surprising patterns of melting during the last interglacial period that suggest that Greenland's ice may be more stable - and Antarctica's less stable - than many thought."The Greenland Ice Sheet is melting faster and faster," says Carlson, who is also a member of the Center for Climatic Research in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. But despite clear observations of that fact, estimates of just how much the ice will melt and contribute to sea level rise by the end of this century are highly varied, ranging from a few centimeters to meters."There's a clear need to understand how it has behaved in the past, and how it has ...