THE Greenland ice sheet may respond much faster to climate change then previously realised. Scientists had thought that rising temperatures would not affect the base of the massive 1.2-kilometre-thick ice sheet for centuries, but GPS data collected by Jay Zwally from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and colleagues has shown that hotter summers in Greenland can speed up the seaward flow of the island’s glacier in just a few weeks (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1072708).
The researchers think that the rapid response could be caused by meltwater seeping down under the ice and helping it slip over…
