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Greenland’s Icemelt Speeding Up

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Greenland is home to ten percent of the world’s ice. Climate is changing swiftly there, especially along the coasts, with important implications for many millions of people at lower latitudes who live on or near the oceans. Warming ocean water has been melting polar ice at least as quickly as rising air temperatures in Greenland and the Antarctic.

Greenland’s coastal ice has been melting with a boost from warm water upwelling from offshore, baring land that has been locked in ice for millennia. “Changes in the ocean eat the ice sheet from underneath,” Sarah Das, a glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts told Stephan Faris of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. “Warmer water causes the glaciers to calve and melt back more quickly.” Cod have been harvested in abundance in these warming waters, and local groceries offer Greenland-grown potatoes and broccoli for the first time. Prospectors are finding zinc and lead in the newly accessible coastal areas, and other prospectors seek gold and diamonds. Alcoa is preparing to build a smelter.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that waters off Greenland’s northeastern coast may contain as much as 31 billion barrels of oil and gas. More oil may be found on the west coast, enough to tempt Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Canada’s Husky Energy and Cairn Energy, and Sweden’s PA Resources. Greenlanders in November, 2008 probably will approve a self-rule charter that directs mineral royalties to national development. The idea is to leverage the fruits of global warming to wean Greenland off its annual $680 million subsidy from Denmark. If carbon dioxide had a sense of irony, it might appreciate the fact that melting ice is opening the way to produce even more fossil fuels.

Speed of Polar Climate Change

Polar climate can change very quickly in geologic time. Using pollen records from marine sediment off southwest Greenland, scientists (including Anne de Vernal and Claude Hillaire-Marcel) have deduced that much of the Greenland ice sheet has melted relatively quickly during periods of sharp natural warming of the Earth’s climate — some as recent as 400,000 years ago, when carbondioxide levels in the atmosphere were lower than today.

During these spells, boreal coniferous forest covered much of Greenland. These spells of abrupt warming (abrupt, that is, in geologic time) reduced the ice sheet to about one-quarter of its present size, and by itself raised world sea levels 4 to 6 meters.

From 2003 through 2007, Greenland lost two to three times as much ice in summer melt as it regained during winter snows. The Greenland ice sheet actually is a relic of the last ice ago, “stranded out of time,” according to Alexandra Witze, writing in Nature.

Even without human-induced global warming, Greenland’s glaciers would not re-form under present conditions. Ice loss is accelerating irregularly year by year, as well. During the 2007 melting season, with temperatures 4 to 6 degrees C. higher than the previous 30 years’ average, 500 billion tons of ice melted — 30 percent more than the previous year, and 4 percent more than the previous record, in 2005, according to Witze’s work.

“Like Minnesota, Except White”

By the summer of 2007, the Greenland ice cap was studded by more than 1,000 shallow melt-water lakes, some as wide as five kilometers, “like Minnesota, except white,” said Witze. Tens of millions of cubic meters of water swirl from these lakes to the base of the ice sheet in a matter of days, opening huge waterfalls where none had previously existed. “It has been only in the last five years that we have realized that — hey — the ice sheet is falling apart,” said Ian M. Howat, a research scientist in Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.

Greenland’s ice is only a fraction of Antarctica’s, but it is melting more rapidly, partly because summers are warmer, allowing for more rapid runoff. Scientists have been studying the melting dynamics of glacial lakes in Greenland. Observers watched as one such lake was sucked through a crack in the ice with a force equaling Niagara Falls. This event was studied by several scientists led by Joughin and Sarah Das of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier, which probably provided the iceberg that sank the Titantic, is “flowing” into the ocean at higher speeds, having accelerated from 5.7 kilometers per year in 1992 to 12.6 kilometers in 2003, Witze wrote.

“For years people have said that the increasing length and intensity of the melt season in Greenland could yield an increase in ice discharge,” said Joughin. “Greater melt in future summers would cause ice to flow faster toward the coast and draw down more of the ice sheet.” This study found that water from the violent draining of surface lakes is quickly distributed to the ice sheet’s base, which accelerates the glaciers’ movement toward the sea.

The melting of Greenland’s ice that has been accelerated by human emissions of greenhouse gases has been taking place much more rapidly than past natural changes. Within a few decades, this melting ice (along with water from other sources, including Western Antarctica) may be pushing the oceans up beaches in Florida, into subway tunnels in New York City, submerging islands near Shanghai, and raising the level of the Thames estuary in London, England. By that time, given the century or two lag-time in ocean warming, it will be too late to reclaim the Greenland ice cap, or many of the world’s coastal urban areas. Generations to come may wonder what we were doing when we still had a chance.

SOURCES

Faris, Stephan. “Phenomenon: Ice Free.” New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 27, 2008.

Joughin, Ian and Das, Sarah, et al. “Seasonal Speedup Along the Western Flank of the Greenland Ice Sheet.” Science Express, April 17, 2008. 1153288v1 DOI: 10.1126/science. 1153288

“Researchers Warm Up to Melt’s Role in Greenland Ice Loss.” NASA Earth Observatory, April 17, 2008.

“Wintertime Disintegration of Wilkins Ice Shelf.” NASA Earth Observatory. July 22, 2008.

Vernal, Anne de and Claude Hillaire- Marcel. “Natural Variability of Greenland Climate, Vegetation, and Ice Volume During the Past Million Years.” Science 320(June 20, 2008): 1622-1625.

Witze, Alexandra. “Climate Change: Losing Greenland.” Nature 452(April 17, 2008)

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).