Greenland's Dying Ice
https://vis.sciencemag.org/greenlands-dying-ice/
Source: By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine [in Sermilik Fjord, Greenland].
Excerpt: This summer, as meltwater streamed off the Greenland Ice Sheet in record amounts, a ramshackle research ship, the Adolf Jensen, sat idling in this fjord, icebergs near its bow and a mystery below it. Two years earlier, oceanographers had moored a sensor in the fjord's depths to decipher how warm Atlantic Ocean waters are eroding Helheim Glacier, one of the ice sheet's largest tongues. But now they couldn't retrieve the 500-meter-deep mooring—or its crucial data. ...Some two-thirds of Greenland's ice loss comes not as meltwater, but as chunks of ice that detach, or calve, from its 300 outlet glaciers—fast-moving rivers of ice that end in long fjords. ... warm Atlantic water is penetrating Sermilik Fjord, which researchers once thought was dominated by Arctic waters. Here, it meets cold meltwater draining through channels beneath the ice. Straneo believes the emerging freshwater, buoyant because of its low salinity, mixes with the warm water and forms a plume that wells up against the glacier's front, causing more melting and fracturing. It's like the ice in your glass of whiskey, she says. "If you just put it in and don't stir, it lasts a long time. If you stir it, it melts really quickly."....
Source: By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine [in Sermilik Fjord, Greenland].
Excerpt: This summer, as meltwater streamed off the Greenland Ice Sheet in record amounts, a ramshackle research ship, the Adolf Jensen, sat idling in this fjord, icebergs near its bow and a mystery below it. Two years earlier, oceanographers had moored a sensor in the fjord's depths to decipher how warm Atlantic Ocean waters are eroding Helheim Glacier, one of the ice sheet's largest tongues. But now they couldn't retrieve the 500-meter-deep mooring—or its crucial data. ...Some two-thirds of Greenland's ice loss comes not as meltwater, but as chunks of ice that detach, or calve, from its 300 outlet glaciers—fast-moving rivers of ice that end in long fjords. ... warm Atlantic water is penetrating Sermilik Fjord, which researchers once thought was dominated by Arctic waters. Here, it meets cold meltwater draining through channels beneath the ice. Straneo believes the emerging freshwater, buoyant because of its low salinity, mixes with the warm water and forms a plume that wells up against the glacier's front, causing more melting and fracturing. It's like the ice in your glass of whiskey, she says. "If you just put it in and don't stir, it lasts a long time. If you stir it, it melts really quickly."....