Greenland's Ice Melting More Slowly Than Expected

Locutus

Adorable Deplorable
Jun 18, 2007
32,230
45
48
65
You know how all those top environmental scientists have been warning us that Greenland's glaciers are melting faster than they ever have before and could raise sea levels by six feet? Yeah, about that


Researchers studying Greenland’s ice say it is melting slower than previously thought.

May 3, 2012 A new study has some reassuring news about how fast Greenland's glaciers are melting away.

Greenland's glaciers hold enough water to raise sea level by 20 feet, and they are melting as the planet warms, so there's a lot at stake.

A few years ago, the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland really caught people's attention. In short order, this slow-moving stream of ice suddenly doubled its speed. It started dumping a whole lot more ice into the Atlantic. Other glaciers also sped up.

"Some people feared if they could double their speed over two or three years, they could keep doubling and doubling and doubling and reach very fast speeds," says Ian Joughin of the University of Washington's Polar Ice Center.

If the world's big glaciers were on their way to a 10-fold speedup, that could lead to a staggering 6 feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. So Joughin and colleagues have been trying to see if that acceleration is under way.

They pored over radar images of 200 Greenland glaciers gathered over the past decade. Graduate student Twila Moon says some of Greenland's glaciers picked up the pace and started surging forward more than 5 miles in a year.


more


Greenland's Ice Melting More Slowly Than Expected : NPR
 

Cabbagesandking

Council Member
Apr 24, 2012
1,041
0
36
Ontario
If only the truth were close to the headline.

The studt actually finds that the rate of retreat of most Glaciers is accelerating. It does not find the overall rate heading for that tenfold increase in rate. For complex reasons, the melt is not all going to the oceans - yet.

However, the lead author still finds an increase of one metre in this century to be plausible. The feared two metres is still on the table since with air and sea temperatues increasing faster than was predicted, the rate of mely may well become much higher.
 

B00Mer

Keep Calm and Carry On
Sep 6, 2008
44,923
7,357
113
Rent Free in Your Head
www.getafteritmedia.com
Earth 100 Million Years From Now

[youtube]uGcDed4xVD4[/youtube]

Watch this and other space videos at SpaceRip Top Videos | SpaceRip

You can now watch this video on:
Earth 100 Million Years From Now | SpaceRip

Earth's landmasses were not always what they are today. Continents formed as Earth's crustal plates shifted and collided over long periods of time. This video shows how today's continents are thought to have evolved over the last 600 million years, and where they'll end up in the next 100 million years. Paleogeographic Views of Earth's History provided by Ron Blakey, Professor of Geology, Northern Arizona University.

----------------------------------------------------------

Looks like buying Land in Alberta is a good investment for the future.. lol