Some 10 percent of Iceland is covered by glaciers. As elsewhere in the world, those glaciers began to melt significantly in the latter decades of the 20th century.
Then, mysteriously, the rate of ice loss slowed starting in 2011. Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by Brice Noël (Utrecht University, Netherlands) believes they have identified why. Blame it on the “cool blob” - astretch of water in the North Atlantic that, for unknown reasons, is just unusually cold. While Iceland’s glaciers continue to melt, the cool blob has cut the melt rate in half.