“Come quickly – look at the glacier!” urges UC Irvine researcher Isabella Velicogna, running to the bow of the Cape Race to gaze at the massive, crumbling face of Eqip Sermia. She’s stunned by what she sees. “So much is gone since a year ago. All that land over there was covered with ice last time.”
UC Irvine glaciologists aboard the Cape Race in August 2014 muscle away icebergs from delicate and expensive sonar equipment (lower middle) used to map remote Greenland fjord bottoms for the first time.
For 3 summers researchers led by Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California have for the first time mapped remote channels below marine terminating glaciers in Greenland. What they discovered is grim:"Greenland's glaciers flowing into the ocean are grounded deeper below sea level than previously measured, allowing intruding ocean water to badly undercut the glacier faces. That process will raise sea levels around the world much faster than currently estimated"
NASA reports on the research published in the Geophysical Research Letters
"Measurements are challenging to obtain beneath hundreds of meters of seawater in poorly charted, ice-infested fjords," Rignot wrote. He and co-authors Ian Fenty of JPL, Cilan Cai and Yun Xu of UCI, and Chris Kemp of Terrasond Ltd., Seattle, obtained and analyzed around-the-clock measurements of the depth, salinity and temperature of channel waters and their intersection with the coastal edge of Greenland's ice sheet.The team found some glaciers perched on giant earthen sills, protecting them from the punishing salt waters for now, while others were being severely eroded out of sight beneath the surface, meaning they could collapse and melt much sooner. "Numerical ice sheet models do not take into account these interactions and as a result underestimate how fast the glaciers will respond to climate warming," said Rignot.
UCI states that Greenland ice melt is "accelerating because warmer ocean waters are hitting submerged glacier faces well below the cold, freshwater surface. The marine waters shoot upward, bringing heat to a larger portion of the face, which in turn melts down faster. Reaching glacier faces and documenting this process offers critical clues about the detailed mechanisms of the melt."Changes to the climate are happening so rapid now that it is hard to keep up with all the studies that are being published. There is very little, if any good news coming out of the Arctic. Both polar regions are changing rapidly and their glaciers are in irreversible melt. In Greenland, if all the ice melted it would raise the sea level worldwide 21 feet which will flood coastal cities. And yet, most of humanity carries on in ignorant bliss not realizing the calamity that awaits us. We must vote as if our lives depend on it because it does. There is not one Republican presidential contender that is not a climate change denier or an enabler. They must not win for the sake of life as we know it.