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October 30, 2004
Is there an accelerating melting and iceberg release in Greenland and the Arctic?
Andrew C. Revkin/The New York Times
More specifically is the miles-high pile of ice cloaking Greenland in balance or not? Are its edges losing more to icebergs and melting than its summit gains each year in snow?
Andrew C. Revkin/The New York Times
Some background
Andrew Rifkin writes:
"Around the edges, Greenland's great mass of ancient ice, which has piled up nearly two miles high across the world's largest island over 120,000 years, is both melting and sliding into the sea at a disturbingly accelerating rate. Already in some places, the coastal erosion of the great ice sheet has been fast enough to cause interior ice fields to measurably slump.
The changes are forcing theorists who had once seen the island's ice as relatively stable to rethink their projections for how the ongoing global warming trend, driven partly by human actions, could affect sea levels in coming decades and centuries."
More here.
I had understood that the Antarctic icecap was also melting but this report suggests otherwise.
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