Latest Greenland Stories

Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science.This mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the...

Canada and Greenland are taking steps to protect populations of polar bears that live between the two countries, officials announced on Friday.Canada's Environment Minister Jim Prentice announced this during a conference call after he signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) along with Greenland's Minister of Fisheries, Hunting and Agriculture, Ane Hansen and Prentice's Nunavut territory representative Daniel Shewchuk.The deal suggests the writing of a partnered committee that would...

In 2007 alone, it lost volume equivalent to draining San Francisco Bay every weekNot that long ago "“ the blink of a geologic eye "“ global temperatures were so warm that ice on Greenland could have been hard to come by. Today, the largest island in the world is covered with ice 1.6 miles thick. Even so, Greenland has become a hot spot for climate scientists. Why? Because tiny bubbles trapped in the ice layers may help resolve a fundamental question about global warming: how fast and how...

An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.While environmental changes at the lake over the past millennia have been shown to be tightly linked with natural causes of climate change -- like periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth's orbit -- changes...

At an Oxford University climate conference, experts announced that sea levels across the globe will almost inevitably rise more than 6 feet."The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable," said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at Germany's Potsdam Institute and a broadly respected sea level expert."There is no way I can see to stop this rise, even if we have gone to zero emissions."According to Rahmstorf,...

Scientists are taking a more in-depth view of how climate change could affect Antarctica's ice, and how even a small change in temperature could lead to a global rise in sea levels."If you're going to have even a few meters it will change the geography of the planet," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told Reuters."Greenland and Antarctica are two huge bodies of ice sitting on land that could really have very serious...

According to a study that might help predict rising sea levels linked to climate change, scientists are surprised at how fast coastal ice in Antarctica and Greenland is thinning. Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Bristol University said that glaciers speeding up when they flowed into the sea caused the biggest loss of ice, which was seen by analysis of missions of NASA satellite laser images."We were surprised to see such a strong pattern of thinning glaciers across...

The most comprehensive picture of the rapidly thinning glaciers along the coastline of both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets has been created using satellite lasers. The findings are an important step forward in the quest to make more accurate predictions for future sea level rise.Reporting this week in the journal Nature researchers from British Antarctic Survey and the University of Bristol describe how analysis of millions of NASA satellite measurements* from both of these vast ice...

Researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution spent last month trying to determine if warmer oceanic waters were seeping into the regions surrounding Greenland.Ruth Curry and a team of researchers based their study on the observation that glaciers have started to flow faster than normal throughout the past decade.This observation led them to believe that warmer, subtropical waters were to blame.In 2005, scientists noticed that Greenland's Helheim Glacier had nearly doubled in...

A new study released on Wednesday showed the Greenland icesheet responded to global warming over the past 10,000 years more quickly than thought, AFP reported.The report suggests that as a result, a medium-sized temperature increase this century could cause the continent-sized ice block to start melting at an alarming rate.The study warns that it is entirely possible that a future temperature increase of a few degrees Celsius in Greenland will result in a icesheet mass loss and contribution...