Greenland's Ice Loss May Be 100 Times Faster Than Initially Thought as Warm Ocean Water Slowly Melts Glaciers Underneath

Current Arctic ice melt estimates are likely to be inaccurate based on a revised model that predicts that glaciers in the cold north may be melting up to 100 times quicker than originally predicted.

Increasing global temperatures due to climate change resulted in the fast melting of the Arctic Ice Pack, East Antarctic glaciers, and the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) that contributed to rising sea levels, Universe Today reported. The new estimates suggest that the Greenland Ice Sheet will lose substantially more ice this century.

Greenland's Ice Loss May Be 100 Times Faster Than Initially Thought as Warm Ocean Water Slowly Melts Glaciers Underneath Pixabay/Barni1

Inaccuracies in Ice Loss Prediction

The inaccuracy in predictions of Greenland's ice loss has been questioned and changed before. For instance, a 2020 study published in Nature Communications discovered that existing computer predictions of how glaciers interact with the rest of the climate system do not reflect reality.

That means something in existing models must be wrong, or the that the models could be incomplete. Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT) believe they have solved a portion of the problem.

According to Science Alert, climate scientists have had to rely on observations from accessible glaciers to create models of how all glaciers melt because of data gaps. However, what is happening to the Antarctic ice sheet in the face of increasing global warming is very different from what is happening to Arctic glaciers.

Recent observational research in Greenland, for example, has discovered that warm ocean water in the country's fjords is chiseling away at areas of the floating ice sheet from beneath. This subsurface melting is extremely difficult to quantify, especially given how near research vessels must travel to calving icebergs.

Scientists analyzed Antarctica's more accessible 'glacier tongues' using the data as a proxy for the Arctic to minimize the risk. However, they are not identical twins despite both having continental ice sheets. Understanding how these glaciers interact with saltwater is critical for improving future climate predictions.

Aiming To Create a Better Model of Melting Glaciers

Physical oceanographer Kirstin Schulz from UT explains in a press release that people took the melt rate model for Antarctic floating glaciers and applied the vertical glacier fronts of Greenland because it was the best that scientists could do given the limited observations.

But in their new study, titled "An Improved and Observationally-Constrained Melt Rate Parameterization for Vertical Ice Fronts of Marine Terminating Glaciers" published in Geophysical Research Letters, the team described a new way of designing ice loss models. They incorporated the physics of the glacier fronts of Greenland and fed the data to a vertical glacier front.

Rebecca Jackson of Rutgers' School of Environmental and Biological Sciences launched robotic kayaks loaded with oceanographic sensors to within 400 meters of Alaska's LeConte Glacier about four years ago. Her data revealed an unexpected picture, showing the LeConte glacier front was melting 100 times faster than previous glacier melt models predicted.

With this data in hand, Schulz collaborated with Nguyen and Pillar to create a better model. They examined a new set of equations to represent the melt rate, taking into consideration the high gradient at which Greenland's glacier fronts contact the ocean.