According to CU-Boulder Professor Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Jacobshavn Glacier on the west coast of the ice sheet, a major Greenland outlet glacier draining roughly 8% of the ice sheet, has sped up nearly twofold in the last decade, he said. Nearby glaciers showed an increase in flow velocities of up to 50 percent during the summer melt period as a result of melt water draining to the ice-sheet bed.
Surface melt from the Greenland ice sheet. This is a raging river of fresh water that can undermine the stability of the Greenland ice sheet while it makes its way to the sea.
Green Car Congress reports that “the 2007 melt extent on the Greenland ice sheet broke the 2005 summer melt record by 10%.”
According to CU-Boulder Professor Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, this is the largest ever recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979.
The melting increased by about 30% for the western part of Greenland from 1979 to 2006, with record melt years in 1987, 1991, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2007.
Air temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet have increased by about 7° F since 1991, primarily a result of the build-up of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
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Maybe Climate Progress isn’t so alarmist after all and a future with an ice-free Arctic is nearer than everyone thinks.
“One of the country’s top ice experts,” says Joe Romm, is a non-alarmist professor of the Naval Postgraduate School.
Wieslaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union audience this week:
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