Greenland’s ice turning to slush at record pace - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Greenland’s ice turning to slush at record pace.

The heatwave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island’s ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82% of its surface covered in ice.
The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5% for this year on Wednesday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. She says that’s expected to expand and peak on Thursday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt. More than 10 billion tonnes of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Wednesday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tonnes from Greenland in july.

“It looks like the peak will be today. But the long-term forecast is for continuing warm and sunny weather in Greenland, so that means the amount of the ice loss will continue,” she said on Thursday in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.
The scope of Wednesday’s ice melt is a number difficult to grasp. To understand just how much ice is being lost, a mere 1 billion tonnes of ice loss is equivalent to about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the Danish Meteorological Institute said. And 100 billion tonnes corresponds to a 0.28 mm (0.01 inch) rise in global sea levels. (Source: The economic times)


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Greenland’s ice turning to slush at record pace.

Greenland Likely To Lose 4.5% Of Its Ice By End Of Century, Says Study - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Greenland Likely To Lose 4.5% Of Its Ice By End Of Century, Says Study

This research used new data on the landscape under the ice today to make breakthroughs in modelling the future.

Greenland could lose 4.5 per cent of its ice, contributing up to 13 inches of sea level rise, by the end of this century if worldwide greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, warns a new study.
The island might be ice-free by the year 3000, said the study published in the journal Science Advances.
"How Greenland will look in the future -- in a couple of hundred years or in 1,000 years -- whether there will be Greenland or at least a Greenland similar to today, it's up to us," said lead author Andy Aschwanden, Research Associate Professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute in the US.

This research used new data on the landscape under the ice today to make breakthroughs in modelling the future.
The findings show a wide range of scenarios for ice loss and sea level rise based on different projections for greenhouse gas concentrations and atmospheric conditions.
Currently, the planet is moving toward the high estimates of greenhouse gas concentrations.
Greenland's ice sheet is huge, spanning over 660,000 square miles. Today, the ice sheet covers 81 per cent of Greenland and contains eight of Earth's fresh water bodies.
If greenhouse gas concentrations remain on the current path, the melting ice from Greenland alone could contribute as much as 24 feet to global sea level rise by the year 3000, which would put much of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans and other cities under water, said the study.
The team used data from a NASA airborne science campaign called 'Operation IceBridge'.
Operation IceBridge uses aircraft equipped with a full suite of scientific instruments, including three types of radar that can measure the ice surface, the individual layers within the ice and penetrate to the bedrock to collect data about the land beneath the ice.
On average, Greenland's ice sheet is 1.6 miles thick, but there is a lot of variation depending on where you measure.
Between 1991 and 2015, Greenland's ice sheet has added about 0.02 inches per year to sea level, but that could rapidly increase. (Source: ndtvnews)


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Greenland Likely To Lose 4.5% Of Its Ice By End Of Century, Says Study

Melting of Arctic ice impacts weather in India - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Melting of Arctic ice impacts weather in India.

• Rising temperature is causing sea-ice to melt, impacting ocean current linked to extreme weather events

• The study was conducted by Germany-based Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research

Months ahead of a major global expedition to explore the Arctic, researchers found that rising temperatures in the region is causing the sea-ice to melt faster than expected, impacting a major ocean current linked to extreme weather events.

The study was conducted by Germany-based Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, whose researchers would spearhead MOSAiC, one of the biggest Arctic Research Expeditions set for sail this year, with participation from more than 17 countries.

The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by some marginal seas which constantly produce new ice in winters. The ice floes are transported from the Siberian part of the Arctic Ocean, across the Central Arctic and into the 600 km wide Fram Strait--the only gateway to the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic Ocean.

This journey is enabled by a wind-driven current called the Transpolar Drift, one of the two major currents in the Arctic Ocean. The journey takes over 2-3 years, during which the ice floats increase in thickness (9.8-13.1 feet).

According to the latest research published in Scientific Reports, only 20% of the sea-ice that forms in the shallow Russian marginal seas of the Arctic Ocean is actually reaching the Central Arctic, where it joins the Transpolar Drift. The remaining 80% of the young ice melts before it reaches Central Arctic and is not thick anymore.

Till the 1990s, half of the ice from Russia’s shelf seas used to make this trans-arctic journey, said the researchers who monitored the movement of the sea-ice with the aid of satellite data for over two decades.

“The melting of sea ice in the marginal seas is now so rapid and widespread that we are seeing a lasting reduction in the amount of new ice for the Transpolar Drift," said the first author, Dr Thomas Krumpen, a sea-ice physicist at AWI. “On average, the ice is 30% thinner than it was 15 years ago. What we’re witnessing is a major transport current faltering, which is bringing the world one major step closer to a sea-ice-free summer in the Arctic."

The faltering of Transpolar Drift could lead to weather implications across countries, including India, as it is a major factor in Arctic Oscillations, a dominant climate pattern that influences weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

According to Indian scientists, it could have a bearing on the south-west monsoon.

“If there is less ice in the Arctic, the polar vortex instead of concentrating in the Arctic, will wobble and come up to mid-latitude. If it comes up to mid-latitude, then it will affect weather in India. We could see a rise in intensity and frequency of western disturbances," said Dr Ravichandran M, Director, National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, Goa.

German researchers highlight that the weakening of Transpolar Drift is also reducing the natural transport of nutrients, algae, sediments and minerals from the Arctic to the Fram Straits, causing lasting changes in the biogeochemical cycles and ecological processes of the central Arctic Ocean in future.

Instead of Siberian minerals, we are now finding more remains of dead algae and microorganisms in our sediment traps," says co-author Eva-Maria Nöthig.

The changes in the biodiversity in the Arctic have been one of the focus areas of Indian researchers as well, who are trying to understand how the ecosystem is changing over the years due to global warming. “Arctic is more important to us. Sea ice is declining much faster in Arctic than Antarctic or the South Pole," said Dr Ravichandran. (Source: Livemint)

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Melting of Arctic ice impacts weather in India.

Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study - Pragnya IAS Academy - News Analysis.

Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study.

Greenland's melting ice, which causes sea levels to rise, disappeared four times faster in 2013 than in 2003 and is noticeable across the Arctic island, not just on glaciers, researchers warned on Tuesday.

"While 111 cubic kilometres of ice disappeared per year in 2003, 10 years later this figure had almost quadrupled to 428 cubic kilometres," the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) Space Lab said in a statement.
Its researchers contributed to a study on changes to Greenland's ice sheet, published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"These are notable and surprising changes we are seeing in the ice melt pattern," DTU professor Shfaqat Abbas Khan said.
Until now, most of Greenland's ice melt was observed on the ice cap, predominantly on the glaciers in the island's northwest and southeast.
But most of the ice loss from 2003 to 2013 was from Greenland's southwest region, which is largely devoid of large glaciers.
Michael Bevis, a professor at Ohio state university and lead author of the PNAS paper, said the ice now appeared to be melting from the surface mass, "melting inland from the coastline." That means that in the southwestern part of Greenland, growing rivers of water are streaming into the ocean.
"We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers," Bevis said.
"But now we recognise a second serious problem: Increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea." He warned this would have major implications, causing additional sea level rise.
"We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point," he said, which would condemn the entire giant ice block to melting over a time scale of hundreds, or several thousand, years
The Greenland ice sheet — up to three kilometres thick — contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels some six metres (yards).
The melting ice observed in the study is caused by rising land temperatures, and in part, the fact that the ice comes into contact with waters that are increasingly warmer.
"As the atmosphere's temperature gradually rises, we will immediately notice an acceleration of the ice melt," Khan said.
While the amount varies from region to region, sea levels rose worldwide by an average of 20 centimetres (about eight inches) in the 20th century. They are currently rising by about 3.3 millimetres per year. (Source: The Economic Times)


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Greenland ice melts four times faster in a decade: Study.