Climate Change News Today: Melting Of Greenland Ice Sheet, Sea Level Rises Yet Again!
Climate chage news today, according to a new research cited from the journal "Nature Climate Change": Over the past few years, Climate change has been altering the structure of Greenland ice sheet by making it unable to limit mass loss of ice by retaining the melt-water, that causes a rise in sea level.
Researchers believe that the Greenland ice sheet has always been pictured as a spongy looking glacier melt-water. But it is actually losing its ability to buffer its contribution to rising levels of sea. They had spent almost five weeks in 2013 drilling firn cores in the interior part of the Greenland ice sheet. (The Firn is multi-year compacted snow that isn't as dense as glacier ice but it forms a porous near-surface layer over the ice sheet). With this climate change News today, due to Greenland's ice cap melting faster than ever, researchers fear loss of the spongy ice could cause further sea level rise!
William Colgan from York University, U.K, said "We were interested in the thin porous near-surface firn layer, and how its physical structure is changing rapidly with climate change," cited The Economic Times, "The study looked at very recent climate change on the ice sheet, how the last couple of years of melt have really altered the structure of the ice sheet firn and made it behave differently to future melt".
They conducted a study using a radar unit to gather profiles between core sites along a 100 Km path from the low elevation ice sheet margin into the high elevation ice sheet interior. It was also analysed if the firn cores on the spot by cutting them into minute sections in order to quantify their properties (like density), so that it can be compared with samples of the next year.
According to Dailymail, the study suggests that the Firn could be up to 260ft thick and be an integral part of the Greenland ice sheet (second only to Antartica in size) with a thickness of 14,000 ft!
To sum up:
- Greenland ice sheet, as it warms, has been absorbing less melt-water.
- Growth in ice lenses- water cannot seep through to lower layers.
- Water collects at surface and gets added to new rivers, causing an increase in the run-off, and thereby causing sea level rise!
The Climate change news today is pertaining to the fact that there is a rise in sea level due to the melting Greenland ice cap.
