Earth’s heat loss causing ice sheet to slide towards sea

Heat lost from the Earth’s interior is causing glaciers to slide from Greenland’s ice sheet towards the sea, a study has found. Researchers from the Aarhus University in Denmark and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources showed for the first time that the deep bottom water of the north-eastern Greenland fjords is being warmed up by heat gradually lost from the Earth’s interior.

This heat loss triggers the sliding of glaciers from the ice sheet towards the sea. “North-East Greenland has several hot springs where the water becomes up to 60 degree warm and, like Iceland, the area has abundant underground geothermal activity,” said Soren Rysgaard, who headed the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

For more than ten years, researchers have measured the temperature and salinity in the fjord Young Sound, located at Daneborg, north of Scoresbysund, which has many hot springs, and south of the glacier Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, which melts rapidly and is connected to the North-East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS). By focusing on an isolated basin in the fjord with a depth range between 200 and 340 m, the researchers have measured how the deep water is heated over a ten-year period.

Based on the extensive data, researchers have estimated …read more