Did you know?
Greenland’s glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously
calculated according to a new model that takes into account the unique interaction between ice and water at the island’s fjords. The new mathematical representation of glacial melt factors in the latest observations of how ice gets eaten away from the stark vertical faces at the ends of glaciers in Greenland. Previously, scientists used models developed in Antarctica, where glacial tongues float on top of seawater, a very different arrangement. “For years, people took the melt rate model for Antarctic floating glaciers and applied it to Greenland’s vertical glacier fronts,” said Kirstin Schulz, a research associate at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. “But there’s more and more evidence that the traditional approach produces too-low melt rates at Greenland’s vertical glacier fronts.”