Melting glacier in Greenland ‘is growing again’, NASA says
A glacier which has been thinning more rapidly than any other in Greenland for the last 20 years is suddenly thickening and growing out towards the ocean again.
The find astonished NASA scientists, who say that the reversal at Jakobshavn glacier is to do with changes in ocean current.
Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California said, ‘At first we didn’t believe it.
‘We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.’
But the find does not mean that global warming is over, the scientists say.
The scientist warn that while the glacier is growing, it is still losing more ice to the ocean than it gains from snow accumulation, so it’s still contributing to sea level rise.
The researchers conclude that the slowdown of this glacier, known in the Greenlandic language as Sermeq Kujalleq, occurred because an ocean current that brings water to the glacier’s ocean face grew much cooler in 2016.
Water temperatures in the vicinity of the glacier are now colder than they have been since the mid-1980s.
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The researchers suspect the cold water was set in motion by a climate pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which causes the northern Atlantic Ocean to switch slowly between warm and cold every five to 20 years.
The climate pattern settled into a new phase recently, cooling the Atlantic in general.
This change was accompanied by some extra cooling in 2016 of the waters along Greenland’s southwest coast, which flowed up the west coast, eventually reaching Jakobshavn.
When the climate pattern flips again, Jakobshavn will most likely start accelerating and thinning again.
