Recent studies revealed that the largest glacier in Greenland is moving from land to sea at record speeds, according to a University of Washington news release.
Back in the summer of 2012, the Jakobshavn Glacier reached a speed of approximately 10 miles per year, or 150 feet per day. This is currently the fastest confirmed flow rate of any glacier or ice stream in Greenland.
"We are now seeing summer speeds more than four times what they were in the 1990s, on a glacier which at that time was believed to be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, glacier in Greenland," study author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington said in the release.
Click here to read the full news release issued by the university.
The Jakobshavn Glacier moves slower in the winter, but its average flow speed is three times what it was back in the 1990s, according to the news release.
What this means is the glacier is adding more ice to the ocean, which increases the sea-level.
"We know that from 2000 to 2010 this glacier alone increased sea level by about [.04] of an inch. With the additional speed it likely will contribute a bit more than this over the next decade," Joughin said.
Jakobshavn Glacier is widely believed by many to be the glacier that produced the iceberg that sank the Titanic back in 1912. It currently drains the Greenland ice sheet and releases it into a "deep-ocean fjord," according to the news release.
"At its calving front, where the glacier effectively ends as it breaks off into icebergs, some of the ice melts while the rest is pushed out, floating into the ocean. Both of these processes contribute about the same amount to sea-level rise from Greenland," the news release reads.
Thanks to a warming climate, the calving process has moved inland, and the glacier's calving front is deeper in the fjord than it used to be, which likely explains the speed increase.
The findings were made thanks to satellite data.
"We used computers to compare pairs of images acquired by the German Space Agency's satellites. As the glacier moves we can track changes between images to produce maps of the ice flow velocity," Joughin said.
Before the end of the century, the calving front could retreat even further inland, possibly as far back as the head of the fjord.
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