Widespread media reports of a lake at the North Pole don’t hold water — but scientists who deployed the monitoring buoys are watching closely as Arctic sea ice approaches its yearly minimum.
Tag: polar science
In recent decades the thinning of glaciers at the edge of Antarctica has accelerated, but new UW-led research indicates the changes, though dramatic, cannot be confidently attributed to human-caused global warming.
UW scientists are teaming with the U.S. Coast Guard to study the new frontier in the Arctic Ocean opened up with the melting ice.
In a pair of companion papers in Science Express this week, scientists investigate the role of surface meltwater on accelerating the flow of the Greenland Ice Sheet and outlet glaciers and conclude that, while surface melt plays a substantial role in ice sheet dynamics, it may not produce large instabilities.
Two of Greenland’s largest glaciers shrank dramatically and dumped twice as much ice into the sea during a period of less than a year between 2004 and 2005.
With warming temperatures as the possible underlying cause, scientists wonder what is pushing Greenland’s glaciers out to sea as much as 50 percent quicker than before.
The world’s fastest glacier, Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae, doubled its speed between 1997 and 2003.