Ohio State Studies Greenland's Big Retreat
Chris Gaitten
Most Ohioans will never see Greenland the way Michalea King has. The sun sparkling off the vast ice sheet that blankets the inland landscape. The crunch of walking across the glaciers—those slow-moving rivers of ice that run to the ocean like outstretched fingers. This land is too distant and harsh to welcome many visitors, but it’s also changing rapidly, to an extent that surprises researchers like King.
In August, she and her Ohio State colleagues issued a stark warning about the magnitude of that change. Scientists have known for years that Greenland’s glaciers are shrinking, but a study from the university’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center found they’re dumping so much ice into the ocean that the entire ice sheet has hit a troubling tipping point. The study, which analyzed satellite images from 1985 to 2018, described how Greenland’s glaciers began retreating much faster around the year 2000. As glaciers shrank, the rate of ice flowing from the interior sheet to the ocean sped up, says King, the lead author. That’s like opening the spillway on a dam, and the entire sheet has been losing mass ever since, says co-author Ian Howat, director of the Byrd Center. King and Howat previously expected the sheet to settle into some new equilibrium, but that hasn’t happened. Now, they’ve concluded it would continue shrinking even if global warming magically stopped.