Researchers Made A Discovery That Changes Everything We Know About Greenland’s Melting Ice

[KamaAina]

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/01/23/greenlands-melting-ice/

A group of researchers at The Ohio State University made a startling discovery while creating a high-resolution map of Greenland’s ice sheet. The researchers noticed that two lakes in the region have disappeared. The findings on each lake were published separately. The research on the first lake studied was published the open-access journal The Cryosphere. The findings related to the second lake were later published in the journal Nature.

Lakes that contain billions of gallons of water form underneath Greenland’s ice sheet. Their existence has been known of and well documented for a long time. A lake disappearing though, is a bizarre occurrence that Cornell University, Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor of earth sciences at Ohio State, who co-authored the paper, call a “milestone” for Greenland’s ice loss.

The researchers believe there is a growing body of evidence that the ice sheet has melted so much that the melt water it creates is flowing into the ice sheet’s “natural plumbing system” which causes “blowouts” to occur, leading to the lakes draining out. One of the lakes that experienced has disappeared has left a mile-wide crater underneath the ice sheet – it only took a few weeks for the lake to completely disappear, with an estimated 6.7 billion gallons of water. For comparison, that amount of water is equivalent to the reservoirs that the 1.9 million people in Columbus, Ohio use for water.


The other lake studied has shown even more alarming behavior. The lake appears to be draining and re-filling. The lake has already emptied and re-filled twice by melt water. Each time the lake drained it brought with it “latent heat” that further weakens the surrounding ice.

Learn to swim.

[Quantess]

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