Greenland’s mountain glaciers and floating ice shelves are melting faster than they were just a few decades ago and becoming destabilized, according to two separate studies published this week.
The island's peripheral glaciers, located mostly in coastal mountains and not directly connected to the larger Greenland ice sheet, retreated twice as fast between 2000 and 2021 as they did before the turn of the century, according to a study published on Thursday.
“It got a lot harder to be a glacier in Greenland in the 21st century than it had been even in the 1990s,” said Yarrow Axford, a professor of geological sciences at Northwestern University and a co-author of the paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Dr. Axford’s team found that glaciers in southern Greenland have become shorter by 18 percent on average since 2000, and glaciers elsewhere on the island have become shorter by 5 to 10 percent.
Persons:
”, Yarrow, Axford’s
Organizations:
Northwestern University
Locations:
Greenland