For more than a decade, a team of University of Montana researchers and students have studied the dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet as it responds to a warming climate.
For more than a decade, a team of University of Montana researchers and students have studied the dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet as it responds to a warming climate. Department of Geosciences researchers Toby Meierbachtol and Joel Harper said water has always been central to their research.
“The water from melting of the ice can run off the surface to the ocean and contribute to sea level rise, it can refreeze in place and actually warm the ice, and it can even reach the bottom of the ice sheet and act as a sort of lubricant to make the ice slide quickly over its bed,” Meierbachtol said. “The importance of water in controlling the response of Greenland to warming is hard to overstate.”
But while much of their focus has been on the importance of water in controlling processes occurring on the ice sheet, their most recent research findings have flipped the order of their thinking.
As outlined in their recent article in Nature Geoscience, Meierbachtol, Harper and an international team of researchers discovered that changes to the ice sheet have an immediate impact on the groundwater underlying the Greenland island, an area larger than the state of Alaska.
Read more at The University of Montana
Photo Credit: Simon via Pixabay
