Latest Greenland Stories

BERLIN -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday she led a congressional delegation to Greenland, where lawmakers saw "firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality," and she hoped the Bush administration would consider a new path on the issue.After meeting with German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, Pelosi praised Berlin for its leadership on the issue.Her trip comes ahead of next week's Group of Eight summit and a climate change meeting next month involving the leading...

In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years, according to a new NASA-funded project using satellite observations. Daily satellite observations have shown snow melting on Greenland's ice sheet over an increased number of days. The resulting data help scientists understand better the speed of glacier flow, how much water will pour from the ice sheet into the surrounding ocean and how much of the sun's radiation will...

A team of NASA and university scientists has found clear evidence that extensive areas of snow melted in west Antarctica in January 2005 in response to warm temperatures. This was the first widespread Antarctic melting ever detected with NASA's QuikScat satellite and the most significant melt observed using satellites during the past three decades. Combined, the affected regions encompassed an area as big as California.Son Nghiem of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and...

Greenland is cold and hot. It's a deep freezer storing 10 percent of Earth's ice and a subject of fevered debate. If something should melt all that ice, global sea level could rise as much as 7 meters (23 feet). Greenland and Antarctica - Earth's two biggest icehouses - are important indicators of climate change and a high priority for research, as highlighted by the newly inaugurated International Polar Year. Just a few years ago, the world's climate scientists predicted that Greenland...

Vast, yet remote; frigid, yet teeming with life; stark and barren, yet serenely beautiful -- these are just a few of the contradictions of Earth's polar regions. Within their frozen confines lie secrets -- clues scientists believe can help unravel some of the mysteries that drive Earth's climate. That's because Earth's poles are sensitive barometers to climate change. They react quickly to a warmer environment, and the effects of these reactions are felt on a global scale. In the past 125...

Research scientist Dr. Alberto Behar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory took in the "show" at the moulin this summer. But unlike Paris' famous Moulin Rouge, this moulin had no singers or colorful dancers adorned in feathers, rhinestones and sequins. Rather, the star of this moulin was Mother Nature herself, presenting a dazzling display of moving water and ice. A moulin is a narrow, tubular shaft in a glacier that provides a pathway for water to travel from the glacier's surface to...

It's widely documented that climate change is causing the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to shrink. Air temperatures in many parts of the polar regions have increased and waters that surround parts of the ice sheets have warmed up. What most do not know is that until just six years ago, we had no real way of measuring whether the ice sheets were shrinking or growing, or at what rate. Today, advances in remote sensing, the use of highly sensitive instruments aboard satellites and aircraft,...

For the first time NASA scientists have analyzed data from direct, detailed satellite measurements to show that ice losses now far surpass ice gains in the shrinking Greenland ice sheet.Using a novel technique that reveals regional changes in the weight of the massive ice sheet across the entire continent, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., report that Greenland's low coastal regions lost 155 gigatons (41 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2003 and 2005 from...

A new analysis of data from twin satellites has revealed that the melting of Greenland's ice sheet has increased dramatically in the past few years, with much of the loss occurring primarily along one shoreline potentially affecting weather in Western Europe.The loss of ice has been occurring about five times faster from Greenland's southeastern region in the past two years than in the previous year and a half. The dramatic changes were documented during a University of Texas at Austin study...

NEW YORK -- For a given level of obesity, Inuit men and women living in Greenland are healthier than those who have migrated to Denmark, Danish researchers have found.The stay-at-home Greenlanders are still living a relatively traditional lifestyle, and they had lower blood pressure, lower levels of the blood fat triacylglycerol, and less insulin resistance -- an indicator of diabetes risk -- according to a report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition."These findings indicate...