Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Terra Daily: Researchers watching the loss of ice flowing out from the giant island of Greenland say that the amount of ice lost this summer is nearly three times what was lost one year ago. The loss of floating ice in 2008 pouring from Greenland's glaciers would cover an area twice the size of Manhattan Island in the U.S., they said.

Jason Box, an associate professor of geography at Ohio State, said that the loss of ice since the year 2000 is 355.4 square miles (920.5 square kilometers), or more than 10 times the size of Manhattan. "We now know that the climate doesn't have to warm any more for Greenland to continue losing ice," Box said. "It has probably passed the point where it could maintain the mass of ice that we remember.

"But that doesn't mean that Greenland's ice will all disappear. It's likely that it will probably adjust to a new 'equilibrium' but before it reaches the equilibrium, it will shed a lot more ice. "Greenland is deglaciating and actually has been doing so for most of the past half-century."

…The research team has been monitoring satellite images of Greenland to gauge just how much ice flows from landlocked glaciers towards the ocean to form floating ice shelves. Eventually, large pieces of these ice shelves will break off into the sea, speeding up the flow of more glacial ice to add to the shelves. Warming of the climate around Greenland is believed to have added to the increased flow of ice outward from the mainland via these huge glaciers….

A glacier in Greenland, shot by Ville Miettinen from Helsinki, Finland, Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License

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