At the end of the summer, a research expedition to the remote Ryder Glacier in northwestern Greenland will be carried out using the Swedish icebreaker Oden.
At the end of the summer, a research expedition to the remote Ryder Glacier in northwestern Greenland will be carried out using the Swedish icebreaker Oden. Ryder 2019 is an interdisciplinary expedition with researchers from Sweden, the USA and Canada. The researchers’ expertise spans fields such as atmospheric chemistry, physics, biology, climatology, ecology, genetic research, glaciology, oceanography, marine geology, geophysics, geochemistry, and archaeology. The overall primary aim is to understand the causes of dynamic changes in the floating parts of glaciers that drain the northwestern Greenland ice into the sea.
“How do these 'ice tongues', together with the sea ice, the influx of warmer water, and the geology of the underwater landscape, impact the stability of the Ryder Glacier? We need to understand this in order to assess the potential contribution of northwestern Greenland’s ice sheet to future sea-level rise,” says Martin Jakobsson, professor at the Department of Geological Sciences at Stockholm University and one of the expedition’s two chief scientists.
Uncertainty about glaciers’ contribution to rising sea level
The greatest element of uncertainty in forecasts of how much the global sea level may rise in a warmer climate is in determining precisely how glaciers and continental ice sheets in contact with the sea will behave. Potential contributions from the Greenland ice sheet and the ice sheets in West Antarctica represent the greatest uncertainties. There are also major uncertainties about how quickly the sea ice in the Arctic may deplete and the destabilisation of frozen gas hydrates bound in the Arctic marine sediments, which may lead to emissions of the greenhouse gas methane.
Read more at Stockholm University
Image: The expedition will study the floating parts of glaciers in northwestern Greenland. (Credit: Photo: Martin Jakobsson)
