Ice melt opens up enormous cracks in Greenland’s ice sheet » Yale Climate Connections

Transcript:

Greenland is covered by more than 650,000 square miles of ice – a massive, frozen ice sheet that blankets the island and slowly flows toward the ocean.

But as the climate warms, the ice is melting and flowing into the ocean more rapidly – causing more cracks, or crevasses, to form in the ice sheet as it’s stretched and pulled apart.

Some of these crevasses are huge.

Chudley: “They can be tens or even 100 meters wide. That’s big enough to fly a helicopter through.”

Thomas Chudley is a glaciologist at Durham University in the U.K.

In a new study, he and his colleagues found that between 2016 and 2021, Greenland’s ice sheet gained more than 900 million cubic meters of crevasses.

That has dangerous implications.

When a crevasse forms, that can cause the ice sheet’s flow to speed up. That results in even more crevasses, triggering a feedback loop where the ice sheet breaks apart faster and faster.

And as more ice melts into the ocean, sea levels will rise – increasing the risk of flooding in coastal cities.

Chudley: “So what happens to the ice sheets over the next 300 years will affect millions of people living around the globe.”

Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media