 ice sheet to ‘adapt’ and accommodate more melt-water, without speeding up the flow of ice toward the oceans. The findings have important implications for future assessments of global sea level rise.
“It had been thought that more surface melting would cause the ice sheet to speed up and retreat faster, but our study suggests that the opposite could in fact be true,” said Professor Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds School of Earth and Environment, who led the study.
The study was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council’s National Centre for Earth Observation, the Philip Leverhulme Trust, and by the European Commission Ice2Sea project.
The Letter entitled ‘Melt-induced speed-up of Greenland ice-sheet offset by efficient subglacial drainage’ by Aud Venke Sundal, Andrew Shepherd, Peter Nienow, Edward Hanna, Steven Palmer & Philippe Huybrechts is published in Nature on 27 January 2011 [doi:10.1038/nature09740].
Contact Hannah Isom in the University of Leeds press office on 0113 343 5764 or email |||EMAIL_ADDRESS||| Well, that`s a cheerful bit of news.
As the props and supports drop away from from the catastrophists case, i can`t help but wonder, just how much time will pass before they, and the absurd edifice they have built collapses and vanishes up their own fundament.
Not soon enough i suspect.
Hmm, 7 metres………that’s a lot!
Be prepared for a whole raft of such, “it might not be as bad as we thought” reports over the next few years.
It’s a face-saving exercise.
The article implies a thirty percent reduction of the ice would increase global sea levels by about 2.3 metres.
1000 years ago there was a third less ice.
There was no perceptible rise in global sea levels.
This was during a time when human population was much lower and water use was lower too.
So if the ice melted by a third again when water use is an order of magnitude much higher today we should not see flooding.
That probably explains why the Greenland ice sheet is still there after thousands of years, surviving the high temperatures of medieval and roman warm periods. Simples!
Summer temperatures in Greenland have been relatively constant, varying between from + 5 to 7 degrees C) during last 100 years. It is the winters that got much warmer (from -9 to -5 C) consequently less ice generated.
It’s an old article but, I think it is A contributing factor....
And once again, it’s why I say... any and all knowledge can be used to abuse.
Another warmist Whack-A-Mole theory gets whacked. Greenland isn’t gonna melt.
Says everything you need to know about climate science in general. Models.
science? Rubbish in, Rubbish out.
Oh I see. Instead of the glacier floating on a lubricating sheet of water, the increasing water flow as spring progresses cuts dendritic channels through the ice (and perhaps the basal rock rubble and dirt), re-grounding the glacier.
Yet glaciers still from time to time speed up. Seems like glaciologists have more basic research to do. Tying “global warming” to glacier research is just t0day’s hook to keep the research funding flowing.
Well when the floating arctic ice melts, it does expose sea water to the oblique radiation from the summer sun, which will allow solar energy to reach into the Artic Ocean depths and increase water temperatures (which often are warmer on the surface, having come from the tropics) But that should also allow for a significant increase in evaporation from those heated waters; which inevitably will lead to greater snow falls; and quite likely on the surrounding lands (there’s more land north of +60 deg, than there is water) And having all that snow and ice growing on the lands surrounding the arctic ocean, is likely to increase the earth albedo, more than is lost from the floating ice; those vast land areas see more sunlight than the Arctic ocean does.
So I wouldn’t be in any hurry to predict a snowballing loss of albedo, when the floating sea ice melts; all that open cold water will also take up more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Since the ice has been there for 420,000 years (from the ice core record) with several time frames of higher temps, ( http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/iceagebook/Image5.gif ) why will it all go this time?
I can’t take any more good news…………………..
…I’m totally into the whole doom and gloom thing.
What part of the law of conservation of mass and the concept of density don’t you understand?
Do this experiment. Fill a glass of water to the brim. Hold it over your lap. Drop in an ice cube. 
Very good. That means I can eat more beef!!!
Maybe what the Warmists are seeing is just part of a cycle. It’s been warmer before I think.
I was debating the Arctic Report Card (ARC) with a glaciologist from SkS last fall. He was pretty much pulling a chicken little by saying the sky was falling because the last 5 years were such absolute dramatic proof that the sky was falling based on the Surface Mass Balance.
So I ran an analysis using the actual numbers from the and the numbers in the report proved that nothing significant is happening. I did the same for another peer-reviewed journal article and found different numbers, but the same result.
All the studies show it has lost mass in the last 10 years, but they also show that there is nothing statistically unusual about the last 10 years.
The issue is this. Glaciers are melting. As the melt water drains to the land/ice surface there is concern that this will lubricate the ice and enhance the sliding of the sea sheer toward to sea. This article claims to show (and the claim seem credible) that higher rates of melting can lead the melt water to carve out channels to the sea and because of these channels the friction between the ice and land can be higher than with low melting — but, I would add, certainly higher than with no melting! With higher temps the glaciers will melt and sea level will rise, but this work means the time it takes to rise the sea levels will be longer, although a lot more work needs to be done before good quantitative models can be constructed.
Won’t Greenland take nearly 10,000 years to completely melt at it’s current pace?
The researchers used satellite observations of six landlocked glaciers in south-west Greenland….
 This very same method was used to find that most coral island atolls over 60 years have stood their ground or increased in size despite sea a sea level rise of 120 millimetres.
No wonder they prefer computer simulations. Reality is just toooooo stark!
So have they figured out that glaciers “retreat” when they shrink and “expand” when they are getting bigger? Or are they still on that pill about glaciers advancing into the sea is proof that they are getting smaller?
As I recall it was our good friend J. Hansen who made the claim about lubrication, but in a law suit he couldn’t name one glaciologist who agreed with him.
“Warmer Temperatures”! Are these animal, vegetable, or mineral?
I would have thought a slightly ‘warmer’ air over Greenland would hold more moisture. Even so, -5 is still below freezing. Greenland is probably the largest highest feature within the Arctic and at it’s highest point is over 3000m. You will know that with either a dry or wet lapse rate temperatures over Greenland can only be lower than what they are at sea level, and at the top that can be between -18 to -30 below the -5, or whatever the temperature is at sea level. As Greenland sticks up so much it will squeeze moisture out of whatever air that passes over it.
At least the Nature acknowledges observation instead of ignoring it.
Surely a glacier’s flow depends on it’s weight, not temperature. If a glacier gains mass higher up this could increase it’s speed. So a rise in temperature could speed up a glacier as it gains mass but also shorten it as the freezing point moves up in height.
Next they will be saying that the Carbon indulgences stolen from Europe have reduced CO2 enough to explain the non-warming temps for last 12 years.
According to the mann made climate hippies Greenland has been through worse warm weather before, and the damn ice is still frakking there a t’ousand years later.
And before that there were several periods with several hundred years of warmer ‘an normal weather incapsulating that enormously thickly icy island.
Apparently, nobody seem to really know how the ice works in and for Greenland, because physically it would have made more sense if inner siberia and inner US/Canada was covered in a couple of mile high ice sheet instead of Greenland which has always be wrapped in kind of warm water.
So, essentially, Greenland is in a state of abnormal flux then compared to the climate hippies standards of normal.
Besides nobody knows what the actual proper size of Greenland used to be before satellites.
Come to think of it, but what is the supposed normal size of Greenland’s ice sheet?
Well at least there is acknowledgement that a glacier is not just a big slab of ice. It has a complex internal hydraulic system that we still know very little about. We shouldn’t make