Information about Greenland Ice Sheet

The Greenland Ice Sheet is a vast body of ice covering roughly 80% of the surface of Greenland. It is the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The ice sheet is almost 2,400 kilometres long in a north-south direction, and its greatest width is 1,100 kilometres at a latitude of 77° N, near its northern margin. The mean altitude of the ice is 2,135 metres. ^[1] The ice sheet covers 1.71 million km², or roughly 80% of the surface of Greenland. The thickness is generally more than 2 km (see picture) and over 3 km at its thickest point. It is not the only ice mass of Greenland - isolated glaciers and small ice caps cover between 76,000 and 100,000 square kilometres around the periphery. Some scientists believe that global warming may be about to push the ice sheet over a threshold where the entire ice sheet will melt in less than a few hundred years. If the entire 2.85 million km³ of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 m (23.6 ft.)^[2]. This would inundate most coastal cities in the world and remove several small island countries from the face of Earth, since island nations such as Tuvalu and Maldives have a maximum altitude below or just above this number.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is also sometimes referred to under the term inland ice, or its Danish equivalent, indlandsis. It is also sometimes referred to as an ice cap. Ice sheet, however, is considered the more correct term as ice cap generally refers to less extensive ice masses.

The ice in the current ice sheet is as old as 110,000 years^[3] However, it is generally thought that the Greenland Ice Sheet formed in the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene by coalescence of ice caps and glaciers. It did not develop at all until the late Pliocene, but apparently developed very rapidly with the first continental glaciation.

The massive weight of the ice has depressed the central area of Greenland; the bedrock surface is near sea level over most of the interior of Greenland, but mountains occur around the periphery, confining the sheet along its margins. If the ice were to disappear, Greenland would most probably appear as an archipelago. The ice surface reaches its greatest altitude on two north-south elongated domes, or ridges. The southern dome reaches almost 3,000 metres at latitudes 63° - 65° N; the northern dome reaches about 3,290 metres at about latitude 72° N. The crests of both domes are displaced east of the centre line of Greenland. The unconfined ice sheet does not reach the sea along a broad front anywhere in Greenland, so that no large ice shelves occur. The ice margin just reaches the sea, however, in a region of irregular topography in the area of Melville Bay southeast of Thule. Large outlet glaciers, which are restricted tongues of the ice sheet, move through bordering valleys around the periphery of Greenland to calve off into the ocean, producing the numerous icebergs that sometimes occur in North Atlantic shipping lanes. The best known of these outlet glaciers is the Jakobshavn Isbræ, which, at its terminus, flows at speeds of 20 to 22 metres per day.

On the ice sheet, temperatures are generally substantially lower than elsewhere in Greenland. The lowest mean annual temperatures, about -31°C (-24°F), occur on the north-central part of the north dome, and temperatures at the crest of the south dome are about -20°C (-4°F).

The ice sheet as a record of past climates

See also: , , and

The ice sheet, consisting of layers of compressed snow from more than a hundred thousand years, contains in its ice today's most valuable record of past climates. In the past decades, scientists have drilled ice cores up to three kilometres deep. Scientists have, using those ice cores, obtained information on (proxies for) temperature, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and forest fires. This variety of climatic proxies is greater than in any other natural recorder of climate, such as tree rings or sediment layers.

The melting ice sheet

Positioned in the Arctic, the Greenland Ice Sheet is especially vulnerable to global warming. Arctic climate is now warming rapidly and much larger Arctic shrinkage changes are projected.^[4] The Greenland Ice Sheet has experienced record melting in recent years and is likely to contribute substantially to sea level rise as well as to possible changes in ocean circulation in the future. The area of the sheet that experiences some melting has increased about 16% from 1979 (when measurements started) to 2002 (most recent data). The area of melting in 2002 broke all previous records^[4]. The number of glacial earthquakes at Helheim and the northwest Greenland glaciers increased substantially between 1993 and 2005.^[5]In 2006, estimated monthly changes in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet suggest that it is melting at a rate of about 239 cubic kilometres (57.3 cubic miles) per year. These measurements came from the US space agency's Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) satellite, launched in 2002, as reported by BBC^[6].

If the entire 2.85 million km³ of ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise 7.2 m (23.6 ft.)^[2]. Recently, fears have grown that continued global warming will make the Greenland Ice Sheet cross a threshold where long-term melting of the ice sheet is inevitable. Climate models project that local warming in Greenland will exceed 3 degrees Celsius during this century. Ice sheet models project that such a warming would initiate the long-term melting of the ice sheet, leading to a complete melting of the ice sheet (over centuries), resulting in a global sea level rise of about seven meters^[4]. Such a rise would inundate almost every major coastal city in the world. How fast the melt would eventually occur is a matter of discussion. According to IPCC^[2], the expected 3 degrees warming at the end of the century would, if kept from rising further, result in about 1 meter sea level rise over the next millennium (see image to the left). Some scientists have cautioned that these rates of melting as overly optimistic. James Hansen, among others, has argued that multiple positive feedbacks could lead to so-called nonlinear ice sheet disintegration much faster than claimed by IPCC. According to a 2007 paper, "we find no evidence of millennial lags between forcing and ice sheet response in paleoclimate data. An ice sheet response time of centuries seems probable, and we cannot rule out large changes on decadal time-scales once wide-scale surface melt is underway." ^[7]

Several factors determine the net rate of growth or decline. These are

1. accumulation of snow in the central parts, which adds mass and lowers sea level
2. melting of ice along the sheet's margins (runoff) and bottom, which decreases mass and raises sea level
3. iceberg calving into the sea from outlet glaciers also along the sheet's edges, which also decreases mass and raises sea level.

IPCC^[2] estimates in their third assessment report the accumulation to 520 ± 26 Gigatonnes of ice per year, runoff and bottom melting to 297±32 Gt/yr and 32±3 Gt/yr, respectively, and iceberg production to 235±33 Gt/yr. On balance, they estimate -44 ± 53 Gt/yr, which means that on average the ice sheet may currently be melting, though it can't be determined for sure. The most recent research using data from 1996 to 2005 shows that the ice sheet is thinning even faster than supposed by IPCC. According to the study, in 1996 Greenland was losing about 96 km³ per year in mass from its ice sheet. In 2005, this had increased to about 220 km³ a year due to rapid thinning near its coasts^[8], while in 2006 it was estimated at 239 km³ per year [1].

The melt zone, where summer warmth turns snow and ice into slush and ponds of meltwater, has been expanding at an accelerating rate in recent years. When the meltwater seeps down through cracks in the sheet, it accelerates the melting and, in some areas, allow the ice to slide more easily over the bedrock below, speeding its movement to the sea. Besides contributing to global sea level rise, the process adds freshwater to the ocean, which may disturb ocean circulation and thus regional climate.^[4]

According to the 2007 report from the IPCC, it is hard to measure the mass balance precisely, but most results indicate accelerating mass loss from Greenland during the 1990s up to 2005. Assessment of the data and techniques suggests a mass balance for the Greenland Ice Sheet ranging between growth of 25 Gt/yr and shrinkage of 60 Gt/yr for 1961 to 2003, shrinkage of 50 to 100 Gt/yr for 1993 to 2003 and shrinkage at even higher rates between 2003 and 2005.^[9]



A paper on Greenland's temperature record shows that the warmest year on record was 1941 while the warmest decades were the 1930s and 1940s. The data used was from stations on the south and west coasts, most of which did not operate continuously the entire study period.^[10]

While Arctic temperatures have generally increased substantially, there is some discussion over the temperatures over Greenland. First of all, Arctic temperatures are highly variable, making it difficult to discern clear trends at a local level. Also, until recently, an area in the North Atlantic including southern Greenland was one of the only areas in the world showing cooling rather than warming in recent decades^[11], but this cooling has now been replaced by strong warming in the period 1979-2005.^[12].

References

See also

• Retreat of glaciers since 1850
• Antarctic ice sheet
• List of glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves around the world
• Polar ice packs

External links

• Real Climate the Greenland Ice
• Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) GEUS has much scientific material on Greenland.
• Emporia State University - James S. AberLecture 2: MODERN GLACIERS AND ICE SHEETS.
• Arctic Climate Impact Assessment
• Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University "Glacial Earthquakes Point to Rising Temperatures in Greenland"