The type of material present under glaciers has a big impact on how fast they slide towards the ocean. Scientists face a challenging task to acquire data of this under-ice landscape. Choosing the wrong equations for the under-ice landscape can have the same effect on the predicted contribution to sea-level rise as a warming of several degrees, says Henning Åkesson, who led a new published study on Petermann Glacier in Greenland.
Credit: Photo credit: Martin Jakobsson
A new study shows that thick sea-ice can increase the sensitivity of Greenlandic fjords to climate warming. Understanding the factors that control how fast glaciers move, break up and deposit chunks of ice (icebergs) into the fjords - and eventually the sea - is vital for predicting how the Greenland ice sheet will change under a warming climate and for predicting global rates of sea-level rise.
A new study led by Stockholm University Assistant Professor Christian Stranne, shows that thick sea-ice outside the fjords can actually increase the sensitivity of Greenlandic fjords to warming. Stranne and a team of researchers from Sweden, Greenland, the Netherlands, the USA, and Canada report on expeditions to two distinct fjords in northern Greenland during the 2015 and 2019 summers. These fjords were practically inaccessible to researchers until quite recently because the sea-ice was too thick - they are some of the least-studied areas on the pla
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happened, but that it was
predictedto happen. Quite a few predictions were made by people working independently as individuals or groups and using different techniques for prediction.
Science and Prediction
Science is of such great use to society because of its powers of prediction. Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the existence of eight elements - since discovered - from his observations of the systematic sets of properties of other chemical elements. The planet Neptune was discovered in 1846 when astronomers searched for a planet in a region where one was predicted to exist based on mathematical models of the Newtonian mechanics of our solar system.