3/30/2018 Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years - Scientific American

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Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last
400 Years
And the melt of the massive ice sheet is only picking up speed

By Chelsea Harvey, E&E News on March 30, 2018

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3/30/2018 Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years - Scientific American

Credit: Getty Images

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The Greenland ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 400 years, new
research suggests. And the melting is only speeding up.

A study published this week in Geophysical Research Letters finds that melt rates in

western Greenland have been accelerating for the last few decades. Melting is now
nearly double what it was at the end of the 19th century, the research suggests. And
the scientists say a significant increase in summertime temperatures—to the tune of
about 1.2 degrees Celsius since the 1870s—is mainly to blame.

Future warming may only continue to enhance the melting, the researchers warn—a
major concern when it comes to future sea-level rise.

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3/30/2018 Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years - Scientific American

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“If we’re going to make accurate predictions of sea-level rise, we have got to
understand how Greenland responds to warming,” said study co-author Erich
Osterberg, a climate scientist at Dartmouth College, in an interview with E&E News.

Much of the recent attention on Greenland’s ice loss has focused on icebergs breaking
away from the ice sheet’s glaciers, eye-catching events that often draw media
attention and capture the public’s imagination. But research suggests that melting
from the surface of the ice sheet actually accounts for more than half of Greenland’s
ice loss. So the factors influencing surface melt rates are just as important to
understand when predicting future sea-level rise.

Satellite observations and ice models have helped scientists estimate surface melt
rates from the last few decades. But there’s another method scientists can use to
confirm these estimates on the ground.

While much of the meltwater runs off into the ocean, a substantial portion trickles
back into the snow as it rolls down the ice sheet and refreezes.

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3/30/2018 Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years - Scientific American

“The record of that melt event is then locked into the glacier,” Osterberg noted.

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Scientists can retrieve it by drilling into the surface of the ice sheet and drawing out a
long core of ice, containing many layers of refrozen water, which they may then
analyze in a laboratory. These ice cores can provide all kinds of valuable information
about the age of the ice and the timing of melt events on the ice sheet.

Osterberg, along with lead study author Karina Graeter and a team of other
researchers, voyaged to western Greenland to investigate in person. In a region
known as the “percolation zone,” where meltwater tends to trickle back into the snow
and refreeze, they drilled beneath the surface and extracted seven ice cores for
analysis.

The cores provided a record of melting events dating back to the year 1550. They
suggest that melt rates in the region have been significantly increasing since the early
1990s, and are currently higher than they’ve been at any other point in the record.

The researchers used models informed with historical climate data to investigate
some of the climatic factors influencing melt rates from one year to the next over the

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3/30/2018 Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years - Scientific American

last century. Fluctuations in ocean temperatures and certain atmospheric circulation

patterns were shown to have a major influence on year-to-year variations in melt
rates since the 1870s.

That’s important to note, because these oceanic and atmospheric patterns may
change under the influence of future climate change. Scientists are still debating how
they may be affected, but the new findings suggest that a better understanding will be
critical to making accurate short-term predictions about melting and sea-level rise.

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That said, ongoing warming is still likely to be the biggest influence on long-term
melting trends. Despite many fluctuations in weather conditions over the last century,
the scientists noticed that the oceanic and atmospheric conditions were nearly
identical at the end of the 19th century and in the early 2000s—yet melt rates in the
2000s were nearly double what they were a century ago.

The major difference between these two time periods is that summer air temperatures
had warmed by more than a degree Celsius in the intervening years because of
ongoing climate change. These findings suggest that, all other weather conditions

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3/30/2018 Greenland Is Melting Faster Than Any Time in the Last 400 Years - Scientific American

held equal, human-caused warming is the greatest long-term factor in Greenland’s

surface melt rates.

And if melting has already doubled in the last 100 years, continued warming may
mean that surface melt becomes an even greater contributor to sea-level rise in the
coming years.

“Essentially, the weather patterns that control these year-to-year changes become less
and less important when you look over longer time scales,” Osterberg said. “Several
decades into the future, the long-term warming trend from greenhouse gases—that’s
going to dominate the signal.”

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily
coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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