Each year, Greenland loses 270 billions tons of ice as the planet warms, however new research shows that some of the water may be trapped in the ice sheet. In the summer of 2015, scientist directly measuring a river of meltwater runoff on the top of the ice. What they concluded was that not as much meltwater flows immediately through the ice sheet and drains to the ocean as previously estimated. This has serious implications for sea level rise considering the enormous size of Greenland. The scientist say that the reason for this is being some of the meltwater is retained in porous ice instead of flowing to the bottom of the ice sheet and out of the sea. Greenland is currently losing an average of about 260 billions tons of ice per year which would contribute about two inches to sea level rise by the end of the century. The flow data, collected over 72 hours, showed that current models are overestimating the amount of runoff by 2- percent to nearly 60 percent. The apparent problem with the current models is that they didn’t consider the possibility of water retention in the ice. Sunlight hits the ice sheet which melts the surface but since some of the light reaches deeper into the ice, it causes melting underneath the surface of the ice sheet. The ice around this internal melting developed a porous texture and can, according to findings, hold on to some of the meltwater. This had led to scientists to change their current models to more accurately measure the amount of meltwater that’s being dumped into the ocean.

Now that scientists know to create new models that account for meltwater trapped in the ice caps due to water retention in deeper layers of the ice, they will be able to collect more accurate data in order to measure sea level rise due to the melting ice water in Greenland and other areas as well. Sea levels continue to rise with projections showing anywhere between 1 to 5 feet of rise by the end of the century. Depending on how accurately scientist are able to measure the rising sea levels determines how exactly prepared we can be to adjust to the changing earth. Sea level also has an impact of climate and natural disasters as rising sea levels could make tsunamis and coastal hurricanes more dangerous and damaging making it all the more important that scientist can accurately measure sea level rise.

 

Citation:

Fountain, Henry, and Derek Watkins. “As Greenland Melts, Where’s the Water Going?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 5 Dec. 2017, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/climate/greenland-ice-melting.html.