It’s Getting Hot Under Greenland
Meltwater draining through an area of the Greenland Ice Sheet creates enough energy to rival that of a massive hydroelectric power station, researchers say.
By Danielle Beurteaux
29 March 2022
Greenland’s 3-million-year-old ice is disappearing, with extreme melt events that even include rain at the highest peak on the island. The 1 millimeter the meltwater adds to sea level every year makes it “by far the most rapidly increasing contribution” to sea level rise, said Poul Christoffersen, a professor of glaciology at the University of Cambridge.
Christoffersen is part of a research team that investigated what happens when meltwater drains through fractures in the ice and falls a kilometer or more to the bottom of the ice sheet. “We haven’t really understood the overall implication of this transfer of what ultimately are huge volumes of meltwater,” said Christoffersen.
“Eighty-two million cubic meters of water was delivered to the base of this glacier in a single day.”
To better investigate those implications, Christoffersen and his colleagues installed an autonomous phase-sensitive radio echo sounding (ApRES) instrument 30 kilometers inland on Sermeq Kujalleq (Store Glacier) and drilled a borehole alongside it. Using data collected from both the radar and the borehole, they tracked the water underneath the ice sheet and how it interacts with the ice above. The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
https://eos.org/articles/its-getting-hot-under-greenland
