As of: March 22, 2024, 1:24 p.m
By: Tanja Banner
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AWI glaciologist Ole Zeising during radar measurements on the 79°N glacier.
© Niklas Neckel
Global warming is affecting the 79°N glacier in Greenland from two sides.
The glacier is showing alarming ice loss.
Greenland – Instability of ice shelves often leads to an acceleration of the inflowing ice – which leads to increased sea level rise.
In order to analyze what is happening to the ice shelf due to global warming, a research team from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) took a closer look at a floating ice tongue in Greenland.
The findings were published in the journal
The Cryosphere
.
The focus of the study was the 79°N glacier in northeast Greenland.
Glaciologist Ole Zeising from AWI explains in a statement: “Since 2016, we have been carrying out radar measurements on the 79°N glacier using autonomous instruments, from which we can determine melting and thinning rates.”
The first author of the study adds: “We were able to measure that the glacier has changed significantly in recent decades under the influence of global warming.”
Glaciers in Greenland have lost more than 160 meters of thickness since 1998
The study shows that these changes are due to a combination of warm ocean influx and a warming atmosphere.
Extremely high melting rates were found over large areas, particularly near the border with the inland ice.
The research results are alarming: since 1998, the thickness of the 79°N glacier has decreased by more than 160 meters.
The glacier is threatened from two sides: warm ocean water erodes the glacier from below, while high air temperatures form lakes on the surface of the glacier, the water of which flows through deep channels in the ice into the ocean.
Both processes have led to significant thinning of the glacier in recent decades.
Researchers are surprised: Glacier melting rates have decreased since 2018
Surprisingly, melt rates on the studied glacier have decreased since 2018, which may be related to a colder influx of seawater.
“The fact that this system reacts on such short time scales is astonishing for systems that are actually sluggish like glaciers,” emphasizes glaciologist Angelika Humbert, who was also involved in the study.
In summer, the high temperatures create entire lakes on the ice of the 79°N glacier.
© Ole Zeising
The question remains what will happen next with the floating glacier tongue.
“We expect it to collapse in the next few years to decades,” explains Humbert.
“We have begun to examine this process in detail in order to gain maximum insight from the process.
Although some such disintegrations of ice shelves have already taken place, we have only ever been able to collect data sets afterwards.
As a scientific community, we are now better off because we had built up a really good database before the collapse.”
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