Intense Rain Events Further Speed Greenland Melt, Can Cause Large Sections Of Sheet To Shift
You may think that warmer temperatures alone were enough to drive the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and you would not be alone -- many glaciologists thought roughly the same.
But a new study shows for the first time that the Greenland Ice Sheet melts rapidly, not just with warm summer temperatures, but also after intense late-summer rain.
The new study shows that these heavy rain events have occurred frequently due to the warmer, wetter weather of the last 20 years, penetrating deeper into the ice sheet, making it move and melt faster.
“We saw 10 to 15 % of the total annual surface melt occur in this unusual week of warm, wet weather in late summer 2011. When this water reached the bed, the ice sheet lifted up and moved faster,” says Sam Doyle, from Aberystwyth University, UK, lead author of the new study, which has just been published in Nature Geoscience. According to his colleague and co-author, professor Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, their results add more weight to scientists’ concerns of the sensitivity of the entire Greenland Ice Sheet to melting.
“We’re seeing that warm wet weather, that is increasing with climate change, is driving more melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet than we thought. And worryingly, this melt is reaching further into the ice sheet,“ says Box, speaking via satellite phone, along with Doyle, as they work together on another field trip on Greenland.
EDIT
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2015/07/alun-hubbard-jason-box-heavy-summer.html
