A NASA-funded study found the world’s fastest glacier,
Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae, doubled its speed of ice flow
between 1997 and 2003. The study provides key evidence of
newly discovered relationships between ice sheets, sea level
rise and climate warming. The study appears in this week’s
issue of the journal Nature.
Jakobshavn Isbrae is Greenland’s largest outlet glacier,
draining 6.5 percent of Greenland’s ice sheet area. The
stream’s near-doubling of ice flow from land into the ocean
is important, because this one glacier has increased the rate
of sea level rise by approximately four percent of the 20th
century rate of increase.
The study used data from satellites and airborne lasers to
derive ice movements. Synthetic aperture radar from Canada’s
RADARSAT and the European Space Agency’s European Remote
Sensing Satellites’ data was used to measure the glacier’s
velocity. Researchers tracked distinct features in NASA
Landsat satellite image pairs to determine velocities.
"Other glaciers have thinned by over a meter a year, which we
believe is too much to be attributed to melting alone," said
Waleed Abdalati, a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and co-author of the study.
"We think there is a dynamic effect in which the glaciers are
accelerating due to warming. This investigation furthers our
understanding of ice-climate interactions of planetary
systems."
For more information and images about this study on the
Internet, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/jakobshavn.ht
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