2023-04-28 06:00:00
Written by Muhammad Ayman
Friday, April 28, 2023 09:00 AM
A recent study revealed that the warming of the Atlantic Ocean displays glaciers that were previously stable.
According to a recent study, it is now declining glacier Greenland is very stable at an unprecedented rate, likely due to the effects of warming oceans due to climate change.
A team of researchers from Ohio State University recently discovered that Greenland’s Steenstrup Glacier underwent a major shift from 2018 to 2021. The glacier retreated nearly 5 miles, experienced a 20% reduction in thickness, and saw a doubling in the amount of ice it releases into the ocean. Moreover, its speed has quadrupled, making it one of the top 10% of glaciers contributing to total ice discharge in the region, according to scitechdaily.
The study was recently published in Nature Communications.
Steenstrup Glacier is part of The Greenland Ice Sheet, a body of ice that covers nearly 80% of the world’s largest island, and is also the largest contributor to global sea rise from the cryosphere, a part of Earth’s ecosystem that includes all of its frozen waters, while While the region plays a crucial role in balancing the global climate system, the region is shrinking dramatically, shedding hundreds of billions of tons of ice each year due to global warming.
Over the past few decades, much of this loss has been attributed to the acceleration of ice discharge from tidewater glaciers and glaciers that connect to the ocean, with many glaciologists believing that this recent rise in ice discharge can be explained by the intrusion of warming waters that It is dredged from the Atlantic Ocean into the fjords of Greenland – important ocean gateways that can affect the stability of local glaciers and the health of polar ecosystems.
“Until 2016, there was no indication that the Steenstrup was interesting in any way, and there were plenty of other glaciers,” said Thomas Chudley, lead author of the study, who completed the work as a research associate at the Byrd Polar Center for Climate Research. In Greenland, which has declined significantly since the 1990s and increased its contribution to sea level rise, but this wasn’t really one of them.”
Not only has Steenstrup been stable for decades, but it has generally been insensitive to the warming temperatures that have destabilized many other regional glaciers, likely due to its isolated location in shallow waters.
“Our current working hypothesis is that ocean temperatures drove this decline, and the fact that glacier velocity has quadrupled in just a few years opens up new questions regarding how quickly really large ice packs are responding to climate change,” Chudley added.
In recent years, glaciologists have been able to use satellite data to estimate the potential volume of glacial ice stored at the poles and how it might affect current sea levels. For example, if the Greenland ice sheet melts, sea levels on Earth might rise. By contrast, Chudley said, if the Antarctic ice sheet collapsed, the oceans might rise by nearly 200 feet.
And while Greenland and Antarctica would take centuries to completely collapse, the global ice sheet has the potential to cause sea levels to rise regarding six feet this century if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to collapse.
With regarding 10% of the planet’s population living in low-lying coastal areas, Chudley said any significant rise in sea level might cause increased risks to low-lying islands and coastal communities from storm surges and tropical cyclones.
Sea level rise in the United States poses a particular risk to coastal cities in places like Florida or Louisiana, Chudley said, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s too late to prevent such a future from happening. Humans have a chance to stop the worst rise in sea level.
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