Jakobshavn Glacier drains 6.5% of the Greenland ice sheet and produces around 10% of all Greenland icebergs. Some 35 billion tons of icebergs calve off and pass out of the fjord every year, but a new study says the glacier loss could increase by 50% . This is horrible news for coastal cities as they face rising sea levels.
And the Trump Administration plans to eliminate the ability of coastal cities to adapt to sea level rise and the salination of aquifers. The EPA is reportedly closing down a unit focused on preparing for the effects of climate change, such as sea-level rise. Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s EPA Secretary justified the decision by saying that adaptation should be conducted at the local, not federal, level.
x xYouTube VideoChris Mooney from the Washington Post reports:
The study found that Jakobshavn is close to 0.7 miles thick where it currently touches the ocean (with only a little over a football field of ice rising above the water and the rest submerged). Is it easy to say percentage above ice vs. percentage submerged? However, only about five to 10 miles inland toward the center of Greenland, the glacier grows considerably thicker and plunges deeper below sea level, eventually becoming over a mile thick, with nearly a mile of that mass extending below the sea surface. Moreover, the glacier is deep over a vast area.
Along most of that distance, the ice will get steadily deeper and thicker, favoring faster retreat. The glacier front is currently moving backward at about a third of a mile per year, and so will plunge into these deeper regions over the course of coming decades.
The greater depth of Jakobshavn matters for at least two reasons. As it retreats, Jakobshavn will present a thicker ice front to the warm ocean, leading to even greater ice flow and loss. Meanwhile, the depth itself favors increased ice loss because at the extreme pressures involved, the freezing point of ice itself actually changes, making it more susceptible to melting by relatively warm seawater in the deepest part of the fjord.
snip
“The greater depth of the trough indicated by the new data will favor faster retreat, but it is such a narrow trough that some stabilization from the sides is likely to continue, so that there is still no worry of the whole ice sheet suddenly falling in the ocean,” said Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State University who was not involved in the study. Alley said this still makes Jakobshavn less of a worry than Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica, which is far wider and less constrained.
The retreat of Jakobshavn glacier x xYouTube Video In participating in the People’s Climate March, we call for the creation of good paying jobs and happy communities, for the right to clean air, water, and land, for healthy ecosystems, and for racial, social and economic justice, as many of those that are most impacted by climate change are also the ones most affected by socio-economic inequality. It’s valuable to point out that no movement can succeed without a strong platform. The People’s Climate Movement acknowledges this and has developed a detailed platform: www.huffingtonpost.com/...