Excerpt from theconversation.com
“Observing Greenland from a helicopter,” one scientist wrote last year, “the main problem is one of comprehending scale. I thought we were skimming low over the waves of a fjord, before … realising what I suspected were floating shards of ice were in fact icebergs the size of office blocks. I thought we were hovering high in the sky over a featureless icy plane below, before bumping down gently onto ice only a few metres below us.”
This is the view described by Durham glaciologist Tom Chudley, when writing about his research showing the Greenland ice sheet isn’t just melting – it’s falling apart. Chudley and his colleagues found crevasses are growing fast, channelling meltwater deep into the ice sheet, accelerating its slide into the ocean.