Warming-Stoked Tides Eating Huge Holes In Greenland Glacier
May 8, 2023 4:16PM PDT
This Aug. 16, 2010, image provided by NASA Earth Observatory shows a piece of the Petermann Glacier that cracked in Greenland. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, May 8, 2023, found that tides and climate change are rapidly melting ice in the grounding line zone of the Petermann Glacier. That’s the point where glaciers go from being on land to floating on water. (Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon/NASA Earth Observatory via AP)
(AP) – Scientists now fear increasingly warmer water in daily tides are doing much more damage to one of Greenland’s glaciers than they thought.
A study published Monday examined the Petermann glacier in far northwestern Greenland.
Warmer water from climate change is eating a large hole deep inside the glacier and accelerating ice loss at its key connection point with the ocean floor.
The hole is bigger than the Washington Monument.
Researchers say if this is happening on the rest of the world’s ice sheets, global ice loss and sea level rise could be twice as fast as previously thought.
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