Greenland’s biggest ice shelf melting
A 39sq km chunk of the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf has broken off in northeast Greenland.
A 39sq km chunk of the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf has broken off in northeast Greenland, prompting scientists to warn that record-breaking temperatures are accelerating ice loss.
Satellite images reveal that a section broke off the Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden glacier and shattered into many small pieces. The section was floating before it broke off so will not directly cause the sea level to rise but scientists said this would still probably occur because ice lying on land was likely to flow more quickly into the ocean.
The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which detected the calving of the ice shelf, said: “The last few years have been incredibly warm in northeast Greenland and this appears to be a progressive disintegration.”
A study last month revealed that Greenland lost a record 532 billion tonnes of ice last year, exceeding the previous record in 2012 by 15 per cent. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet is one of the main causes of the rising sea level.
Jenny Turton, a polar researcher at Friedrich-Alexander University in Germany, told The Times: “Small mass loss through calving has been experienced since the early 2000s (which is) as long as we have data for, but normally these are on the scale of two to five square kilometres per year, whereas in the last two years, this was 50 square kilometres per year.”
The Times
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