By Dr Tom Slater, University of Leeds, UK How does mass balance vary over Greenland? The mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet is the net difference between ice gains through snowfall, and ice losses through melting at its surface or underneath its floating ice tongues, and through the calving of icebergs from glaciers flowing […]
Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance Read More »
By Lauren Rawlins, University of York Since the early 1990’s, the amount of meltwater on the Greenland Ice Sheet has dramatically increased due to rising air temperatures from climatic warming and darkening of the ice surface (1). Observations from satellite imagery over this time have seen the supraglacial hydrology system become more extensive, form further
Supraglacial hydrology of the Greenland Ice Sheet Read More »
The Greenland Ice Sheet is one of two continent-scale ice masses on Earth, with the other being the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The Greenland Ice Sheet is the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere. It lies from 71°N northwards, between the Atlantic and the Arctic Ocean [1]. Almost 80% of Greenland’s landmass is covered by
An introduction to the Greenland Ice Sheet Read More »
By Neil McDonald, Stirling University What is an ice tongue? Ice tongues are simply floating platforms of ice which are attached to the front of marine-terminating glaciers and extend into the sea. Ice tongues differ from ice shelves as they are confined by valley walls and have a narrow width relative to their length, hence
Ice tongues on the Greenland Ice Sheet Read More »
The Greenland Ice Sheet is the world’s second ice sheet. It lies in the Northern Hemisphere. It is quite different to Antarctica in character. It has enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 7.4 m on full melting (Morlighein et al., 2018). Like Antarctica, its ocean-terminating outlet glaciers are vulnerable to ocean heating.
Changing Greenland Ice Sheet Read More »
How much land ice is there in the World? Most (99.5%) of the permanent ice volume in the world is locked up in ice sheets and glaciers. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is the largest store of frozen freshwater; it would raise sea levels by 57.9 m (its “sea level equivalent”, or SLE) on full melting
What is the global volume of land ice and how is it changing? Read More »
A new paper by Levermann et al. in PNAS uses the record of past rates of sea level rise from palaeo archives and numerical computer models to understand how much sea level rise we can expect per degree of warming in the future. These data suggest that we can expect a global sea level rise
Sea level rise over the next 2000 years Read More »
In this new website, www.greenlandmelting.com, you can browse maps of the surface melt on Greenland in each year from 1979. You can also look at years with extreme melt events, such as 2010 and 2011.
