Greenlands Little Secret

Happy holidays everyone! Sorry about the lack of posts in the past few weeks, been very busy with festive cheer and less cheery deadlines!

Thought i'd just keep you up to date with a new study I found recently in Nature Geoscience which could have some serious repercussions for global sea level responses to melting.

A drill rig was used to extract old snow cores from within the Greenland snow aquifer. 
(Photo: Evan Burgess) 

An enormous aquifer has been discovered under greenland's ice sheet. This aquifer was found accidentally by glaciologists as they drilled for ice cores in southeastern greenland in 2011. It is more than 27,000 sq. miles large according to data from NASA's operation ice bridge radar, meaning it holds an estimated 154 billion tons of water, fed by meltwater that flows through the Greenland ice sheet.

A thin section of a core extracted from the aquifer by Koenig's team is held in front of the sun.
Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Ludovic Brucker 

If released it would be enough to raise global sea levels by .04cm, which may not seem that much considering sea levels already rise by more each year because of melting ice sheets. The importance of this discovery however comes from what it could do for our understanding of how meltwater moves through the greenland ice sheet into the seas, which when considering the acceleration of ice loss from Greenland in recent years, is important when predicting the effect warming has on melting and sea level rise.


The full article can be found here.