Detailed study of a Greenland glacier’s flow rate reveals the impact of environmental conditions.
Detailed study of a Greenland glacier’s flow rate reveals the impact of environmental conditions.
Even though ‘glacial’ is commonly used to describe extremely slow, steady movement, a new study has found that glaciers speed up and slow down on a daily – even hourly – basis in response to changes in air temperature, rainfall and the tides.
A research team including scientists from Japan’s Hokkaido University studied the movement of a glacier in Greenland over six summers and mapped those movements against local weather patterns and tides to explore how these affect the glacier’s flow. The results have been published in the journal The Cryosphere.
“Short-term speed variations are key to understanding the physical processes controlling glacial motion, but studies are sparse for Greenlandic tidewater glaciers, particularly near the calving front,” says Hokkaido University’s Shin Sugiyama, lead author of the study. “Studying glacier dynamics near the ocean boundary is crucial to understanding the current and future mass loss of the ice sheet.”
Read more at Hokkaido University
Image: The calving front of the Bowdoin Glacier/Kangerluarsuup Sermia. (Photo Credit: Shin Sugiyama)
