Record ice melt seen on Greenland in 2007
14 December 2007
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The amount of melt on Greenland’s ice sheet last summer broke the previous measured record by 10 percent, according to new data analyzed by researchers at Colorado University.
The 2007 melt was the largest ever recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979, researcher Konrad Steffen told colleagues at a conference of the American Geophysical Union this week.
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The melting has increased by about 30 percent for west Greenland from 1979 to 2006, with record melt years in 1987, 1991, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2007, said Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at Colorado University.
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His team used data from military and weather satellites to chart the melt. It also maintains 22 monitoring stations on the ice sheet that transmit hourly data via satellites to Colorado University at Boulder.
Steffen noted that while Greenland has been thickening at higher elevations due to more snow, the gain is more than offset by accelerating loss where glaciers meet the sea.
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Of particular concern is an increase in shafts known as moulins, which drain melt water from surface ponds down to bedrock.
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The current contribution of Greenland ice melt to global sea levels is about .02 inches a year, Steffen’s institute noted, but the potential impact is enormous. About a quarter the size of the United States, Greenland has about one-twentieth of the world’s ice — the equivalent of about 21 feet of global sea rise were it to completely melt into the sea.
That process could take centuries to complete, but once started would be difficult to reverse.
Uriel Sinai / Getty Images file
Icebergs float in Greenland’s Jacobshavn Bay on Aug. 24. The icebergs are calved from the Jacobshavn Glacier, which is draining twice as much ice melt into the ocean as it was two decades ago.
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