Even if the climate cools, study finds, glaciers will continue to shrink
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Nearly 40 years of satellite data from Greenland shows that glaciers on the island have shrunk so much that even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.
The finding, published today, Aug. 13, in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, means that Greenland’s glaciers have passed a tipping point of sorts, where the snowfall that replenishes the ice sheet each year cannot keep up with the ice that is flowing into the ocean from glaciers.
“We’ve been looking at these remote sensing observations to study how ice discharge and accumulation have varied,” said Michalea King, lead author of the study and a researcher at The Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. “And what we’ve found is that the ice that’s discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that’s accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet.”
King and other researchers analyzed monthly satellite data from more than 200 large glaciers draining into the ocean around Greenland. Their observations show how much ice breaks off into icebergs or melts from the glaciers into the ocean. They also show the amount of snowfall each year–the way these glaciers get replenished.
The researchers found that, throughout the 1980s and 90s, snow gained through accumulation and ice melted or calved from glaciers were mostly in balance, keeping the ice sheet intact. Through those decades, the researchers found, the ice sheets generally lost about 450 gigatons (about 450 billion tons) of ice each year from flowing outlet glaciers, which was replaced with snowfall.
“We are measuring the pulse of the ice sheet–how much ice glaciers drain at the edges of the ice sheet–which increases in the summer. And what we see is that it was relatively steady until a big increase in ice discharging to the ocean during a short five- to six-year period,” King said.
The researchers’ analysis found that the baseline of that pulse–the amount of ice being lost each year–started increasing steadily around 2000, so that the glaciers were losing about 500 gigatons each year. Snowfall did not increase at the same time, and over the last decade, the rate of ice loss from glaciers has stayed about the same–meaning the ice sheet has been losing ice more rapidly than it’s being replenished.
“Glaciers have been sensitive to seasonal melt for as long as we’ve been able to observe it, with spikes in ice discharge in the summer,” she said. “But starting in 2000, you start superimposing that seasonal melt on a higher baseline–so you’re going to get even more losses.”
Before 2000, the ice sheet would have about the same chance to gain or lose mass each year. In the current climate, the ice sheet will gain mass in only one out of every 100 years.
King said that large glaciers across Greenland have retreated about 3 kilometers on average since 1985–“that’s a lot of distance,” she said. The glaciers have shrunk back enough that many of them are sitting in deeper water, meaning more ice is in contact with water. Warm ocean water melts glacier ice, and also makes it difficult for the glaciers to grow back to their previous positions.
That means that even if humans were somehow miraculously able to stop climate change in its tracks, ice lost from glaciers draining ice to the ocean would likely still exceed ice gained from snow accumulation, and the ice sheet would continue to shrink for some time.
“Glacier retreat has knocked the dynamics of the whole ice sheet into a constant state of loss,” said Ian Howat, a co-author on the paper, professor of earth sciences and distinguished university scholar at Ohio State. “Even if the climate were to stay the same or even get a little colder, the ice sheet would still be losing mass.”
Shrinking glaciers in Greenland are a problem for the entire planet. The ice that melts or breaks off from Greenland’s ice sheets ends up in the Atlantic Ocean–and, eventually, all of the world’s oceans. Ice from Greenland is a leading contributor to sea level rise–last year, enough ice melted or broke off from the Greenland ice sheet to cause the oceans to rise by 2.2 millimeters in just two months.
The new findings are bleak, but King said there are silver linings.
“It’s always a positive thing to learn more about glacier environments, because we can only improve our predictions for how rapidly things will change in the future,” she said. “And that can only help us with adaptation and mitigation strategies. The more we know, the better we can prepare.”
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This work was supported by grants from NASA. Other Ohio State researchers who worked on this study are Salvatore Candela, Myoung Noh and Adelaide Negrete.
“Even if the climate cools, study finds, glaciers will continue to shrink”
That is true, but only in a rather special sense. Glaciers react slowly and flow slowly, so when the climate cools the higher parts will start growing immediately, but it will take some time before the effect reaches the ice-edge, a few years to a few centuries, depending on the size of the glacier.
“last year, enough ice melted or broke off from the Greenland ice sheet to cause the oceans to rise by 2.2 millimeters in just two months.”
Also not exactly a lie, though it was more like 1,5 mm. And they forgot to mention that the melt season is only about two months, and that the ice is stable or growing the other ten months:
http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/mass/Grace_curve_La_DK_20190800.png
“King said that large glaciers across Greenland have retreated about 3 kilometers on average since 1985”
Very dubious. The glacier we have the longest baseline (except possibly for Illulissat) is probably Nordenskiöld glacier, which was carefully mapped (by Nordenskiöld) in 1883:
http://runeberg.org/polexp1883/0233.html
And 137 years later it has actually advanced slightly:
https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/?v=-446086.5116005251,-2475039.653427741,-96390.51160052512,-2306847.653427741&p=arctic&t=2020-07-29-T14%3A19%3A50Z
Sorry that the image is two weeks old, but it has been snowing like blazes in Greenland recently, so it is hard to find a clear day:
http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/surface/SMB_curves_LA_DK_20200813.png
Incidentally USAF photographed all of Greenland with Trimetrogon cameras back in the forties for map-making. It would be fairly simple to dig out those photographs and measure exactly how much the ice area has changed in 75 years, but nobody seems interested.
Sea level IS going up and has BEEN going up at nearly the same rate for the last 200 years that tide gauges have been measuring it. And you know what? The water has to be coming from somewhere, and Greenland and Antarctica are good bets as the source. In other news the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning and Francisco Franco will still be dead.
Steve, acquifer extraction adds about 0.6mm to sea level annually. So at least some sea level rise is man made. According to this article, future population growth and development will increase the rate further.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/6/120531-groundwater-depletion-may-accelerate-sea-level-rise/
Thermal expansion of sea water also adds to sea level rise. Given the estimates I have seen of this effect, the effect on sea level of glacial melting must be very small. I once had an amusing discussion with a climate alarmist who gave his own estimate of icecap melting on sea level. I pointed out that after adding in the effect from groundwater extraction that he had just proven that thermal expansion of sea water could not be happening. This meant that he believed that the seas were not warming. It was hilarious watching him trying to dig himself out of the hole that he had dug for himself. After a few similar discussions with him where I pointed out rather large holes in his belief system, he no longer talks to me about global warming. That was a shame because I always enjoyed his attempts to convert me from being a climate denier (as he put it) into an adherent of his religious cult.
There is an even more odd effect. As glacier ice has a density of about 0.91 and polar ocean water has a density of about 1.03 a glacier of which more than 88% is below sea level (as in some parts of West Antarctica) will actually cause sea-level to sink as it melts. It does not contain enough water to fill up the hole it makes.
It is this that makes for the odd effect that a complete meltout of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will have less than half the effect of a similar meltout of Greenland, though West Antarctica is much larger.
I have to remember that one just to remind some really smarty pants friends with Phd’s in the various disciplines and academic credentials. I can just see their face sag as they realize they can’t argue with facts. Good point!
Thermal expansion is local. If there’s an El Nino in the middle of the Pacific, does that cause sea level rise at the New York tide gauge? No, it doesn’t, so come up with some other non-sense.
Storm surge makes NY tide gauge rise, then it falls back to normal. A point alarmunistas simply refuse to accept.
Steve, are you really claiming that if the overall temperature of the oceans increases that this would not cause thermal expansion and therefore an increase in sea level? Seriously?
The post says “…the glaciers were losing about 500 gigatons each year.” From what I’ve read, a cubic kilometer of ice weighs approximately one metric gigaton. Wikipedia (yea I know) says Greeland’s ice sheet contains 2,850,000 cubic kilometres of ice. Maybe my math is off, but that’s about 5,700 years of melting before it’s gone.
A little over a cubic kilometer. The density of glacier ice is about 0.91. And the top 300 feet is actually compacted snow, not ice.
They talk about how rapidly we will lose the ice. They conveniently don’t mention rapid is 5k+ years.
This paper would seem to suggest that the world has experienced numerous equivalent tipping points in the past 2,000 years, none of which somehow seem to have tipped. But you can never go wrong by assuming that this time is different….
https://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/solomina16qsr_238964.pdf
Glacier != Ice Sheet != Ice Cap
The article uses these terms interchangeably.
Climate “science”, as it hurtles along towards catastrophic global stupidity, aka “Stupid Change” has passed the point of no return.
So many tipping points and so little time left to party before the dooming-
Glaciers retreating are not a problem. When they begin advancing year over year is when you need to worry because that’s what will happen when we (eventually) exit the current interglacial. The people then will look back and wonder why people now panicked about a little warmth and will be wishing they had some.
DING DING DING!!! We have a winner!
One of the biggest lies the Climate Nazis have sold to the uninformed and the gullible is the ridiculous notion that a warmer climate is a “worse” climate for humanity or any other life on Earth.
Even the determined-to-be-dense about it should be able to consider the diversity and extent of like in the tropics vs. the poles and figure that a warming climate is GOOD news, not bad.
Climate changes constantly, humans are not causing it and can not stop it. Why is this so hard for college educated morons to grasp? Just think of the billions, no, trillions of dollars pissed away on poor and out right bad educations since, say, 1920. And lets us not forget the insidious infiltration of leftist ideology during this same period. Yea, lies, in layers like an onion.
Has anybody told them the glacier is displacing it’s mass in magma?
Kind of important.
MGGA – Make Greenland Green Again
I’m gonna get a green baseball hat that says Make Greenland Green Again. The stoopid alarmists probably won’t even be able to figure it out.
Check Dahl-Jensen (Nature, 2013). Her ice core shows that the Eemian (about 125K years ago) was 6-8 deg C warmer in summer for 6000 (!) years and Greenland only lost a max of 30% of its ice. Humans can’t induce an integrated warming that large, so the alarmism in this piece is just BS
In related news, Bigfoot researchers are more confident than ever.
I live in prime Bigfoot country. Should I be concerned?
goldminor
I wouldn’t be. Back in the days when the hills were crawling with armed prospectors and meat hunters to provide food for the prospectors, there was never an unidentified creature killed. I knew a guy in his 90s who lived in Hayfork (Trinity County). He had done everything from working on a gold dredge to ranching. In the Wintertime, when he didn’t have a lot of responsibilities, he supplemented his income by running down mountain lions with a pack of dogs to collect the bounty, and stay in the good graces of the local game warden by providing him with mountain lion livers, which he apparently was fond of. His dogs never flushed out a Bigfoot. Today, lots of deer are killed by cars and trucks. Never a single Bigfoot. Nor have any deer hunters ever come across the carcass or bones of a Bigfoot. It seems highly unlikely that such a creature actually exists. For the reported sightings, if they are not a prank, I’d put my money on a bear standing on its hind legs.
Climate change has endangered Bigfoot aka: Darrel.
Bigfoot? His name is Daryl.
..and, Daryl can read Danish.
The Greenland ice sheet is not there at all – it just seems to be. Global temperatures have been around 20 C for most of the last 600 years (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Temperature-and-CO2-levels-over-600-million-years-Source-MacRae-2008_fig1_280548391) which is way over the “discovered” tipping point – so the Greenland ice sheet disappeared right at the end of Pre-Cambrian (if it ever existed at all). Which requires another explanation: why is the virtual Greenland ice sheet (that isn’t there) now virtually melting/calving beyond the point of recovery? Is anthropogenic global warming affecting even our fantasies?
If Trump doesn’t get re-elected, that’s what I call a tipping point.
OMG,
Where to start, this ‘piece’ is so full of junk.
I’ll just comment on this part:
‘ King said that large glaciers across Greenland have retreated about 3 kilometers on average since 1985–“that’s a lot of distance,” she said. The glaciers have shrunk back enough that many of them are sitting in deeper water, meaning more ice is in contact with water. Warm ocean water melts glacier ice, and also makes it difficult for the glaciers to grow back to their previous positions.‘
I’m not sure that ice floating on the sea can be called a glacier but ok, if ice on the sea ‘shrunk back’ 3 km towards the shore how are they now ‘in deeper water’? In general water depth decreases when you get closer to shore. when the ice body decreases 3 km in length how can it be that ‘more ice is in contact with water’?
And how does the warm ocean water ‘makes it difficult for the glaciers to grow back’, when the ice is pushed from the land out onto the sea?
I’ll stop here, the rest was covered in previous comments.
I wonder if eureka alert ever reads what they publish, in any event critical thinking is not required apparently.
Stay sane,
Willem
Willem69
It is not uncommon for a glacier to develop a terminal moraine underwater if the snout is stationary for a period of time. It often becomes grounded on its own moraine. If it starts retreating, then the water behind the moraine will be deeper and it will float.
They are in deep something alright. Not sure that it’s water though.
wikipedia attributes the Antarctic ice sheet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_ice_sheet) to a lowering of CO2 as the greater effect than the opening of the Drake Passage, with a tipping point of 600ppm. So lets burn FF until we get CO2 over 600ppm to see if the Antarctic ice sheet melt!
Greenland Ice area is only a small drop down from the peak over the LIA.
Even with the anomalies indicated by “those who would try to scare us”, any ice loss is indistinguishable against the total ice mass
Greenland temperatures are well less than they were BC
Pass point of no return? Good, then I can stop worrying about it. Another climate scare story to file away.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145185/major-greenland-glacier-is-growing
Not so fast, Ohio State, you are looking through your “Buck Eyes”.
“Jakobshavn has spent decades in retreat—that is, until scientists observed an unexpected advance between 2016 and 2017. In addition to growing toward the ocean, the glacier was found to be slowing and thickening. New data collected in March 2019 confirm that the glacier has grown for the third year in a row, and scientists attribute the change to cool ocean waters.”
Ice loss from the1980 -1990 warming following the bitter cold and ice build up during the 35 year cooling period BEFORE the satellite period (1944-1979), the so-called “Ice Age Cometh” period is conveniently not mentioned. The Climate Wroughters of course have progressively erased this incontrovertible (and inconvenient) temperature excursion.
The Jakobshavn glacier is known as the worlds fastest moving glacier. It looks like it’s making a speedy recovery. The Climate Wroughters, after noting 3 consecutive years of reversal, thickening and build up of this glacier, stopped reporting on it, so I know we can say the 4th year of growth is occurring as we read and write.
Jaccob Slavin plays defense for the Carolina Hurricanes hockey team.
Good referenced, Gary! Thanks for the info/link!
A number of commentators have picked up on “past the point of no return” but “ a silver lining”.
As with the Great Barrier Reef which is “dying” or “93% dead, north of Cairns” or 45% dead overall ,
the obituaries never quite match the reality of say Peter Ridd’s paper “The extreme resilience of corals on the Great Barrier Reef etc.”
I have fun with alarmists who run these lines about the death of the GBR.
If it’s dead, let’s give up on it.
No need for billions to be spent on The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and other Foundations.
60,000 people employed in that area of tourism can get jobs in industries with a more optimistic future.
No need for all those expensive tourism campaigns by the Queensland and Australian Governments etc.etc.
But there is always a “silver lining” as with the Greenland glaciers.
Is it too cynical to say that without a “silver lining” there would be no silver for the authors who disturb us daily with these papers?
We might yet see Greenland get back to being a green land. Or maybe, not. The Danes could reap a fortune in water-front real estate.
By this weird logic, every automobile has a disaster-laden tipping point. Cars get faster and faster until uncontrollable, if you think only of their acceleration mode.
But, cars have brakes to avoid the tipping point. You have to think of the balance between acceleration and deceleration. Just as you have to balance ice gain with ice loss on Greenland.
In truth, nobody can forecast whether or not Greenland faces a tipping point, so the paper is about activism, not hard science. Geoff S
Woefully disappointing!
That is not a “tipping point” of any sort!
That is what is required for glaciers to lose mass.
Not that these alarmists ever bothered to visit greenland and physically measure total ice mass versus the miniscule portions flowing to the sea.
Greenland is NOT like that island that someone no-very-bright told us was going to tip over..
It would take a major planetary scale cataclysm to tip Greenland !
???
Where do I mention Greenland might tip over?
I’ve quoted the relevant passage above. Where the authors use a phrase that was once common during earlier alarmist claims regarding climate tipping point insinuations and they imply the Earth can not recover once their claimed tipping point is exceeded.
I believe the island you refer to is Guam and a certain dull witted senator. Even Guam requires a cataclysm to cause a Guam subsidence.
I don’t know. Put enough Marines on anything and it is bound to get tippy!
Oh no!! Billions of people depend on that ice sheet for survival! In the Philippines we are told to panic about this and it is all Trump’s fault.
Even the clown President Duterte is spouting off about the dangers of climate change, increasing typhoons and sea level rise. Of course, all he wants is the climate cheque promised by the Paris Agreement for third world developing countries. Which won’t go to the people, but will be stolen in the corruption of that sorry state of affairs in such a beautiful 7000+ islands of Paradise. Clean up the pollution first (and the corruption) and then we can talk.
” even if global warming were to stop today, the ice sheet would continue shrinking.”
Good news, retreating glaciers no longer an indicator for global warming.
Which we already knew, as the calving is the flow of ice that formed in the past.