Scientists say Greenland just opened up a major new ‘floodgate’ of ice into the ocean

[jpak]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/11/12/scientists-say-greenland-just-opened-up-a-major-new-floodgate-of-ice-into-the-ocean/

As the world prepares for the most important global climate summit yet in Paris later this month, news from Greenland could add urgency to the negotiations. For another major glacier appears to have begun a rapid retreat into a deep underwater basin, a troubling sign previously noticed at Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier and also in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica.

And in all of these cases, warm ocean waters reaching the deep bases of marine glaciers appears to be a major cause.

The new fast-moving glacier is the Zachariae glacier or Zachariæ Isstrøm, located in the far northeastern part of Greenland. In a new paper in Science, Jeremie Mouginot of the University of California-Irvine and his colleagues find that the ocean-based glacier, which contains 0.5 meters or a foot and a half of potential sea level rise, has begun a rapid retreat, especially since 2012. The glacier has lost fully 95 percent of the ice shelf that used to help stabilize it, they say, and now sports a 75 meter high ice cliff extending above the water (the glacier also extends hundreds of additional meters below it).

“This is sort of the second major floodgate from Greenland that has opened up,” says Eric Rignot of UC-Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the authors of the study. The first, says Rignot, was the Jakobshavn glacier, Greenland’s “fastest” moving, according to a recent study, which is currently based 1,300 meters below sea level and also retreating into a deep basin.

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[LiberalArkie]

1. Crap.. I guess that means I have to watch "Day After Tomorrow" this weekend.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

2. If the salinity falls too much the Gulf Stream could stop and then England freezes.

[friendly_iconoclast]

3. That wouldn't be too good for *New* England, either-or the rest of the N. hemisphere:

https://www.google.com/search?q=younger+dryas+climate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=younger+dryas

[Spitfire of ATJ]

4. The irony is the reluctance of Europe to accept Middle Easterners....

We could see Europeans having to migrate to the Middle East.