Greenland’s Ice Sheet's Melting Rate 'Significantly Underestimated' by Climate Community

Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory studied the Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland and discovered a previously unknown manner that the ice and ocean interact.

According to the glaciologists, these findings may indicate that climate community has significantly underestimated the amount of projected sea level rise brought on by thinning polar ice.

Researchers explained Greenland's rapid ice melting

(Photo : MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images)

The grounding line of the Petermann Glacier, where ice separates from the land and starts floating in the ocean, varies significantly over tidal cycles, causing warm seawater to infiltrate and melt ice at a faster rate, as per phys.org.

The old theory of grounding lines beneath ocean-reaching glaciers held that they did not move throughout tidal cycles or undergo ice melt.

However, lead author Enrico Ciraci, a UCI assistant specialist in Earth system science and NASA postdoctoral researcher, challenged this theory.

However, the latest study disproved that notion by demonstrating that warm ocean water occurs beneath the ice through pre-existing subglacial channels, the greatest rates of melt occurs at the grounding zone.

Warm water created a 670-foot-tall crater in the glacier's underside when the grounding line of Petermann Glacier receded approximately 4 kilometers, 212 miles between 2016 and 2022.

The PNAS research emphasized that over the past few decades, the Greenland ice sheet gradually loses billions of tons of ice into the ocean, with the majority of this loss being brought on by the warming of underlying ocean waters, a result of the planet's deteriorating climate.

The glacier front's ice melts rapidly in the presence of ocean water, eroding the glaciers' ability to travel over the surface of the land, and accelerating the ice's descent to the sea.

Also Read: Melting Glaciers May Give Birth to the Next Pandemic

Years when glaciers would melt

Your choice of glaciers will determine your answer.

For up to 20 million years, there have likely been glaciers covering parts of the Antarctic continent, as per USGS.

There are certain places where glaciers, including those in the valleys of the Antarctic Peninsula and the Transantarctic Mountains, may have existed as early as the Pleistocene.

In terms of Greenland, ice cores and related evidence indicate that during the most recent interglacial era, some 125,000 years ago, all of southern Greenland and the majority of northern Greenland were ice-free.

The climate back then was up to three to five degrees Fahrenheit warmer compared to interglacial we are currently experiencing.

Glaciers could reduce melting through building seafloor

Engineers searched for creative solutions to halt the sea level rises that are anticipated to occur from global warming, building walls on the ocean floor could be the next frontier in climate science, as per The Guardian.

Scientists think they can stop the disintegration of undersea glaciers as they slip into the deep by building barriers of rock and sand.

The structures would not only be intended to slow down glacier melting, but also to stop warmer water from penetrating to the glaciers' seafloor bases.

They estimated that a tiny underwater wall with more complicated designs would have a 70% chance of successfully preventing half the warm water from reaching the ice shelf while being more difficult to construct in the severe conditions on the sea floor in the south polar regions.