Arctic sea ice minimum climatecentral.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from climatecentral.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This week, NASA’s airborne Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission begins its final survey of glaciers that flow from Greenland into the ocean. OMG is completing a six-year mission that is helping to answer how fast sea level is going to rise in the next five, 10, or 50 years.
Greenland’s melting glaciers currently contribute more freshwater to sea level rise than any other source does. The glaciers are melting six or seven times faster today than they were only 25 years ago, and OMG is the first NASA mission to focus solely on what the ocean contributes to this ice loss. That’s a critical part of helping improve calculations of future melt rates so that coastal communities worldwide can take timely precautions to limit the damage from higher seas.
Jan 27, 2021
Greenland’s melting glaciers, which plunge into Arctic waters via steep-sided inlets, or fjords, are among the main contributors to global sea level rise in response to climate change.
Gaining a better understanding of how warming ocean water affects these glaciers will help improve predictions of their fate. Such predictions could in turn be used by communities around the world to better prepare for flooding and mitigate coastal ecosystem damage.
But researchers have long lacked measurements of the depths of the fjords along Greenland’s craggy coast. Without this information, it’s extremely difficult to arrive at a precise assessment of how much ocean water is being allowed into the fjords and how that affects glacier melt. By measuring their fjords one by one, a new study published in Science Advances has quantified, for the first time, how the warming coastal waters are impacting Greenland’s glaciers.
Scientists with NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland mission are probing deep below the island’s warming coastal waters to help us better predict the rising seas of the future.