Slip And Slide Suicide

Posted on June 25th, 2006 by mike

Should all of [Greenland's] ice sheet ever thaw, the meltwater could raise sea level 21 feet and swamp the world’s coastal cities, home to a billion people … the glaciers of Greenland are melting twice as fast as they were five years ago … The increasingly erratic behavior of the Greenland ice has scientists wondering whether the climate, after thousands of years of relative stability, may again start oscillating … computer models on which climate predictions are based did not take the dynamics of the glaciers into account … the monolith of ice is constantly on the move … [they have] accelerated in response to warmer temperatures, as summer meltwater lubricated the base of the ice sheet and allowed it to slide faster toward the sea. In a way no one had detected, the warm water made its way through thousands of feet of ice to the bedrock in weeks, not decades or centuries … On the eastern edge of Greenland, the Kangerlussuaq Glacier, like the Jakobshavn, has surged, doubling its pace. To the west, the Helheim Glacier now appears to be moving about half a football field every day … If they all slide too quickly, there is a possibility that … they could collapse suddenly and release the entire ice sheet into the ocean.

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