Rapid melting of Greenland glacier could raise sea levels for decades

Beneath the calm, white surface of Greenland, rivers of ice are flowing into the ocean—and some are moving very fast indeed. The speedy glaciers on the island’s warmer west coast, shedding kilometers of ice into the sea each year as warm ocean waters under-mine them, have raised the most alarm about potential sea level rise. But a much bigger glacier is now on the move in Greenland’s remote ?northeast—and a new study suggests it’s likely to continue its rush to the sea for decades to come.

The vulnerable glacier, part of a broader flow of ice called the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, shows that yet another region of Greenland is feeling the effects of warming oceans. “Until fairly recently, we’ve seen the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream as a cold, re-mote feature that wasn’t likely to do anything interesting,” says Ben Smith, a glaciologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who was not involved in the study. But as Jeremie Mouginot of the University of California (UC), Irvine, lead author of the new paper published online in Science today, explains, “It’s one more side of Greenland that’s starting to lose mass … It’s like a boat that is taking on water from all sides.”

Hundreds of fjords indent Greenland’s coastline, filled with glaciers ending in tongues of floating ice that periodically break off into chunks, or calve. The 600-kilometer-long Northeast Greenland Ice Stream is one of the island’s largest, draining 12% of the interior ice sheet. “It’s part of the central nervous system of Greenland,” says Eric Rignot, also of UC Irvine and a co-author on the paper. “You can see the trace of this ice stream all the way to the summit.”www.glorybios.com