Climate Denial Crock of the Week

As the melt season begins with a resounding crunch.

LiveScience:

Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier recently made headlines for its record-breakingly fast flow. Now, a new satellite image provides a visual of this process.

In a comparison between two images of the glacier, one taken May 9 and the other June 1, the loss of kilometers of ice from the calving front of the glacier is visible. The change is so significant that the after image almost looks like it has been “zoomed out” to make the glacier look smaller. But the views are the same. The missing ice simply slipped into the sea.

The Jakobshavn glacier is one of Greenland’s most prominent. It drains some 6.5 percent of the Greenland ice sheet area into the Ilulissat Icefjord in western Greenland, according to NASA. Researchers believe this glacier produced the iceberg that wrecked the Titanic.

Jacobshavn, also known as Ilulissat glacier, was the target of the Dark Snow team’s first hop to the ice last season.  We flew along this same calving wall in late june, 2013.

Ilulissat is one of the outlet glaciers that communicates thru a deeply carved glacial valley, from the sea, to the low interior regions of Greenland.

Phys.org:

The bedrock canyons sit well below sea level, meaning that as subtropical Atlantic waters hit the fronts of hundreds of glaciers, those edges will erode much further than had been assumed and release far greater amounts of water.

Ice melt from the subcontinent has already accelerated as warmer marine currents have migrated north, but older models predicted that once higher ground was reached in a few years, the ocean-induced melting would halt. Greenland’s frozen mass would stop shrinking, and its effect on higher sea waters would be curtailed.

“That turns out to be incorrect. The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated – and for much longer – according to this very different topography we’ve discovered beneath the ice,” said lead author Mathieu Morlighem, a UCI associate project scientist. “This has major implications, because the glacier melt will contribute much more to rising seas around the globe.”

The study points out that Jakobshavn “flows down one of the deepest and narrowest trenches in Greenland,with a bed several hundreds of metres deeper than in previous reconstructions.”

This is one reason that Greenland Uber-expert Dr. Richard Alley pointed out recently that understanding Greenland melt is more important than ever.

Mother Jones:

Alley puts it like this: “If we’ve committed to 3.3 meters from West Antarctica, we haven’t committed to losing Greenland, we haven’t committed to losing most of East Antarctica. Those are still out there for us. And if anything, this new news just makes our decisions more important, and more powerful.”

As Dr. Jason Box prepares to set up the Dark Snow encampment next week, weather will be critical.

Dark Snow Project June 11, 2014:

Weather was very warm yesterday in Kangerlussuaq, at least 15 C (60 F) but 20 C (70 F) at the unofficial airport site. The river came up fast and wide between our 10 AM first look to the late afternoon; 24 h sun here on the Arctic circle. The snowline is migrating up the ice sheet. It seems we arrived right on the start of continuous melt. The previous days have had variable weather and even fresh snow on hilltops.

The melt is ON. The extended forecast is for warm sunny weather…

The warm weather is a relief because right now, snowline is ~850 m above sea level. We aim to camp at 1250 m and don’t want to arrive to slush deeper than our ankles.

The precipitation forecast for next Wednesday would come the night of our camp put in. We’d rather have snow than rain. But the freezing level in the atmosphere would be right at camp elevation, so it would be a ‘wintery mix’.