From NASA, I had to laugh at this statement:
The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).
That’s assuming it can get out sometime in the distant future. Greenland’s topography under the ice is bowl shaped.
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Buried underneath compacted snow and ice in Greenland lies a large liquid water reservoir that has now been mapped by researchers using data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge airborne campaign.
A team of glaciologists serendipitously found the aquifer while drilling in southeast Greenland in 2011 to study snow accumulation. Two of their ice cores were dripping water when the scientists lifted them to the surface, despite air temperatures of minus 4 F (minus 20 C). The researchers later used NASA’s Operation Icebridge radar data to confine the limits of the water reservoir, which spreads over 27,000 square miles (69,930 square km) – an area larger than the state of West Virginia. The water in the aquifer has the potential to raise global sea level by 0.016 inches (0.4 mm).
“When I heard about the aquifer, I had almost the same reaction as when we discovered Lake Vostok [in Antarctica]: it blew my mind that something like that is possible,” said Michael Studinger, project scientist for Operation IceBridge, a NASA airborne campaign studying changes in ice at the poles. “It turned my view of the Greenland ice sheet upside down – I don’t think anyone had expected that this layer of liquid water could survive the cold winter temperatures without being refrozen.”
Southeast Greenland is a region of high snow accumulation. Researchers now believe that the thick snow cover insulates the aquifer from cold winter surface temperatures, allowing it to remain liquid throughout the year. The aquifer is fed by meltwater that percolates from the surface during the summer.
The new research is being presented in two papers: one led by University of Utah’s Rick Forster that was published on Dec. 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience and one led by NASA’s Lora Koenig that has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The findings will significantly advance the understanding of how melt water flows through the ice sheet and contributes to sea level rise.
When a team led by Forster accidentally drilled into water in 2011, they weren’t able to continue studying the aquifer because their tools were not suited to work in an aquatic environment. Afterward, Forster’s team determined the extent of the aquifer by studying radar data from Operation IceBridge together with ground-based radar data. The top of the water layer clearly showed in the radar data as a return signal brighter than the ice layers.
Koenig, a glaciologist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., co-led another expedition to southeast Greenland with Forster in April 2013 specifically designed to study the physical characteristics of the newly discovered water reservoir. Koenig’s team extracted two cores of firn (aged snow) that were saturated with water. They used a water-resistant thermoelectric drill to study the density of the ice and lowered strings packed with temperature sensors down the holes, and found that the temperature of the aquifer hovers around 32 F (zero C), warmer than they had expected it to be.
Koenig and her team measured the top of the aquifer at around 39 feet (12 meters) under the surface. This was the depth at which the boreholes filled with water after extracting the ice cores. They then determined the amount of water in the water-saturated firn cores by comparing them to dry cores extracted nearby. The researchers determined the depth at which the pores in the firn close, trapping the water inside the bubbles – at this point, there is a change in the density of the ice that the scientists can measure. This depth is about 121 feet (37 meters) and corresponds to the bottom of the aquifer. Once Koenig’s team had the density, depth and spatial extent of the aquifer, they were able to come up with an estimated water volume of about 154 billion tons (140 metric gigatons). If this water was to suddenly discharge to the ocean, this would correspond to 0.016 inches (0.4 mm) of sea level rise.
Researchers think that the perennial aquifer is a heat reservoir for the ice sheet in two ways: melt water carries heat when it percolates from the surface down the ice to reach the aquifer. And if the trapped water were to refreeze, it would release latent heat. Altogether, this makes the ice in the vicinity of the aquifer warmer, and warmer ice flows faster toward the sea.
“Our next big task is to understand how this aquifer is filling and how it’s discharging,” said Koenig. “The aquifer could offset some sea level rise if it’s storing water for long periods of time. For example after the 2012 extreme surface melt across Greenland, it appears that the aquifer filled a little bit. The question now is how does that water leave the aquifer on its way to the ocean and whether it will leave this year or a hundred years from now.”
Maria-José Viñas
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Will scientists ever look at Greenland again without fear of melting ice and rising seas?
Really?
How much did I pay for this?
Cynically speaking, would it be fair to say, some actual science has been done here?
Accidentally?
To cover this mistake, as careers must be at stake, all the obligatory waffle of sea rise and global warming has been thrown in, to cover some rather interesting news.
However water under ice, is not unexpected by anyone with experience near either pole.
Most of the very small furry creatures in Canada, live under the snow, gaining a thermal advantage which lets them survive our winters.
SasjaL,
Wave heights in open ocean can reach over 100′ Winds can whip the surface of the ocean into a froth, blurring the line between air and water. The surface of the oceans are in constant motion and different parts are moving in different directions.
A sane estimate of global sea level would include error bars of at least +/- 100 feet.
David Oliver Smith and bobl – that was my first thought too: that it made a mockery of ice core data. Actually, although I’m very sceptical of ice core data, I am not sure that it really is that hopelessly bad, and I suspect that this particular paper is the more wrong, ie, it is even less reliable than ice core data.
In order for the water to freeze and release all that energy it will have had to thaw and absorb that same energy. Net zero, game over.
It’s about time someone made the point about the topography of Greenland. The weight of the ice is so great that the surface of the land has been depressed in the shape of a bowl.
This water can get out in two ways:
1) If it freezes and then is squeezed out by the pressure of the ice above.
2) if ii is displaced by ice from above and forced out through lateral cracks in the ice.
So they should look for lateral cracks or channels in the ice. But first check with the people in Antarctica who have already reported such channels.
This find does not strike me as a bid deal.
Teddi says:
December 23, 2013 at 1:59 pm
Does everything NASA publishes have to have a reference to global warming ?
That or a reference of outreach to the muslim world, per Obama’s mission statement for NASA.
MattS on December 23, 2013 at 9:38 pm
You responded to a rhetorical question. 100 feet is 30.48 m, so the answer is the same as what I wrote about the moon. It was just one other obvious thing that changes sea level and makes 0.016″/0.4 mm ridiculous small and put it within margin of error
BBC uses the word ‘Lurking’ to portray a threat
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/
TOM J says:
“What makes an ice covered road treacherous is the thin film of liquid water on top that can’t permeate the ice. That water can exist in a liquid state down to -30 to -40 F. ”
Any time you put pressure on ice it liquifies, that why skates and curling rocks work.
Tires only have traction if they don’t spin or slide, and under a normally rolling tire the the rubber is instantaneously not moving. Once the tire spins or slides its riding on a layer of water on ice.
I think you’re all missing the point. This discovery has opened up huge vistas of untapped grant money; hence the excitement.
“If this water was to suddenly discharge to the ocean, this would correspond to 0.016 inches (0.4 mm) of sea level rise.”
Under which scenario would that ever happen?
If you look at the related article on the (notoriously warmist) BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25463647) you’ll find it says “They believe that it holds roughly 140 billion tonnes of water, which is the equivalent to 0.4mm of sea level rise PER YEAR” [my emphasis].
It’s the aquifer which keeps giving, apparently…
gary turner says:
December 24, 2013 at 10:26 am
“If this water was to suddenly discharge to the ocean, this would correspond to 0.016 inches (0.4 mm) of sea level rise.”
Under which scenario would that ever happen?
If Greenland tipped over the aquifer would spill into the ocean, bowl shaped or not. Government experts discussed the risk of the island of Guam capsizing and tipping over in March 2010 congressional hearings:
Hardly world-shaking news since much of the Greenland ice-sheet is warm-based, i. e. there is a water film beneath the ice. It’s pretty hard to see how a warm-based ice-sheet could not have an aquifer beneath it. Most likely cold-based ice sheets have aquifers underneath too, but they would be sealed beneath a layer of permafrost.
As for where the water will go, almost all aquifers ultimately drain to the ocean provided the top of the aquifer is higher than the current sea level. Gravity and all that you know. The rate depends on the hydrostatic head of the water and the permeability of the ground/rock.
It must be the new measure unit for volumes.
Astronomers identified a planet, 15 light years away, which could raise sea levels by 1000 km. It has a few satellites, the smallest of which could raise sea levels by 100 m, drowning most major cities of the world.
So, we go from “the Sun plays no role in our global climate” to now “ice may be wet”? Are these scientists really this dumb?
Don’t we already know that there is water under ice? Especially if that ice sits in a bowl?
What next? darker sides of earth tend to be cooler than those that are sun-lit?
The moon plays no role in global climate change?
A very embarrassing paper filled with lies and feeble notions of pseudoscience “conclusions” galore.
Water storage in firn is a known topic and studied to death for decades (10).
Water in firn is NOT a “new facies”, only and idiot would write that and I know the idiot first hand who pined it.
Let’s call this one the “Triumph of Geography Over Common Sense and The Death Of Physics.”
“Project” Ice-Bridge is indeed in dire straights pushing such a ludicrous paper and paying off Nature Geoscience reviewers and Editor. How else could a travesty as this be “published” in other than a supermarket Tabloid … Oh …. this is Nature “Non”Geoscience. Ha Ha.
An aquifer was discovered below the soil surface of Greenland? And they are shocked by that? Surprised? Turned upside down? Sounds like a guy who doesn’t know where milk, eggs, and steak come from.
They found the missing heat! It’s at the bottom of Greenland.
I’m kind of boggled by this article, it doesn’t seem to a have purpose than to say we drilled into firn and hit water. It uses the term aquifer in a manner that departs from the usual definition (underground rock or sediment that contains water) to mean porous firn in an ice sheet that contains water. Maybe this terminology makes some sense in a bizarre sort of way. They claim in the abstract that “This represents a previously unknown storage mode for water in the ice sheet” even though the discovery of this phenomenon is not new (as TalentKeyHole Mole noted, this has been known since the 1950s) and they reference other articles on the phenomenon. The idea that this can lead to sea-level rise also appears to be a stretch. The abstract is located at http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2043.html#ref1 . and references another article: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7423/full/nature11566.html
The referenced article suggests that sea level rise would be buffered because melt water would have to fill the pores in the firn prior to being able to runoff into the ocean.
But I guess if you can magically move all this water at once it could magically rise sea-level in that magic world.
This is outrageous. They should have known that there would be water there and now they have gone and contaminated it. (It is virtually impossible to sterilise the equipment.)
So science fail. True scientists are trying to think up a way of exploring the Vostok reservoir (which they surely already knew about) without contamination. So far they admit they don’t know how.
Subglacial lakes are well known. A century and a half ago the Tete Rousse glacier ruptured and spewed its liquid underground lake onto St Gervais, France. 200 or so dead. And many other historical examples.
This seems a case of children being left alone in the lab / munitions factory.
Maybe we can put Algore to work siphoning all that water out of there and spitting it into the ocean? That’s more productive than what he’s been doing for years.
I looked at the aquifer(s) and the adjacent seabed alluvial formation and it seems possible that this aquifer could discharge in a non-stochastic manner… This could matter as it may impact the Northern Atlantic Conveyor Current. A sudden and significant discharge of freshwater could trigger events like the Younger Dryas. By dating the water in the aquifer, there could be relationships inferred for these type of minor events and / or ice ages.