Massive Waves of Melting Greenland Ice Warped Earth’s Crust
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/massive-waves-of-melting-greenland-ice-warped-earths-crust
Source: By Emily Underwood, Earth & Space Science News (EoS, AGU)
For Investigation:
Excerpt: Greenland’s roughly 1.7 million square kilometer ice sheet has waxed and waned for millennia, with slabs of ice calving into the sea during the summer and snow building the sheet back up in the winter. In recent decades, however, warming temperatures have caused the ice to melt faster than it can refreeze, sending large volumes of freshwater into the ocean. In a new study, Adhikari et al. deduced that the record-setting ice melts of 2010 and 2012 triggered a strange phenomenon: the propagation of an enormous solitary ice wave. This pulse traveled down glacier for many kilometers. The Earth’s crust is elastic, meaning that it changes shape with the redistribution of mass on its surface, much like the deformation of a foam mattress. When a glacier melts, as 95% of the Rink Glacier basin did in 2012, the bulk of the meltwater mass flows into the ocean, shifting gigatons of ice and water away from the glacier’s interior....
Source: By Emily Underwood, Earth & Space Science News (EoS, AGU)
For Investigation:
Excerpt: Greenland’s roughly 1.7 million square kilometer ice sheet has waxed and waned for millennia, with slabs of ice calving into the sea during the summer and snow building the sheet back up in the winter. In recent decades, however, warming temperatures have caused the ice to melt faster than it can refreeze, sending large volumes of freshwater into the ocean. In a new study, Adhikari et al. deduced that the record-setting ice melts of 2010 and 2012 triggered a strange phenomenon: the propagation of an enormous solitary ice wave. This pulse traveled down glacier for many kilometers. The Earth’s crust is elastic, meaning that it changes shape with the redistribution of mass on its surface, much like the deformation of a foam mattress. When a glacier melts, as 95% of the Rink Glacier basin did in 2012, the bulk of the meltwater mass flows into the ocean, shifting gigatons of ice and water away from the glacier’s interior....