Washington, May 9 (ANI): A sophisticated computer model that provides a new insight into the impact of climate change on the production of icebergs by Greenland glaciers has revealed that the shape of the ground beneath the ice has a strong effect on its movement.
Over the past decade, ice-loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet has been accelerating, which has raised concerns about runaway losses and consequent sea-level rise.
But research into the four major Greenland fast-flowing glaciers has enabled researchers to show that while these glaciers may show several bursts of retreat and periods of high iceberg formation in future, the rapid acceleration seen in recent years is unlikely to continue unchecked.
The scientists first investigated the current behaviour of the four glaciers and found that the rate at which they lost ice depended critically on the shape of the fjords on which they sat and the topography of the rock below them.
A computer model for fast-flowing outlet glaciers was then specifically designed from their investigations that gave a projected sea-level-rise contribution from these glaciers of 2cm to 5cm by the year 2200, which is lower than estimates based solely on the extrapolation of current trends.
Lead author Dr Faezeh Nick, of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, said that it turned out that if the fjord a glacier sits in is wide or narrow it really affects the way the glacier reacts.
He said that the important role of the terrain below the ice shows that the scientists need to get a much clearer picture of the rest of Greenland's glaciers before they have the whole story.
The scientists chose the four glaciers, Petermann, Kangerdlugssuaq, Helheim and Jakobshavn, as together they drain around 20 percent of the Greenland ice sheet.
The model -developed within the EU funded ice2sea programme - predicts that, together these glaciers will lose on average, 30Gigaton (Gt) of ice per year to 47Gt per year over the 21st century.
The study has been published in Nature. (ANI)
|
|
Comments:
