lightblueline

The International Herald Tribune [January 16, 2007] reported on new scientific evidence for the melting of the Greenland ice shelf. New islands, formerly believed to be part of a penninsula are now being exposed by the retreating ice.

"Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which produces topographical maps for mining and oil companies. (Greenland is a largely self-governing region of Denmark.) Last summer, he spotted several new islands in an area where a massive ice shelf had broken up. Jepsen was unaware of Schmitt's discovery, and an old aerial photograph in his files showed the peninsula intact.

'Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when the connecting glacier-bridge retreated southward,' Jepsen said, adding that future maps would take note of the change.

The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.

Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.

'That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,' Boggild said. 'If you lose that much volume you'd definitely see new islands appear.'

He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. 'Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it,' he said. 'I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers.'

The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime 'glacial earthquakes' have been detected within the ice sheet.

'The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don't react very quickly to climate,' said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. 'But that thinking is changing right now, because we're seeing things that people have thought are impossible.'

A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise."

You can read the entire article here:

The Warming of Greenland

NEED an alternative opinion? Here is one from the Washington Times:

Astray in Greenland