The Greenland ice sheet, the world’s second-largest body of ice, is fracturing at an unprecedented rate due to climate change, a study has found.
Researchers analysed 8,000 three-dimensional surface maps from high-resolution commercial satellite imagery to track the evolution of cracks in the ice sheet from 2016 to 2021.
Their findings revealed that crevasses—wedge-shaped fractures in glaciers—had expanded significantly in both size and depth over the five-year period, at a faster pace than previously observed.
“The biggest thing I was surprised about was how fast this was happening. One previous study showed changes over the scale of decades … and now we’re showing this happening on scales of five years,” said Dr Tom Chudley, an assistant geography professor at Durham University and lead author of the study.
Since 1992, melting in Greenland has contributed approximately 14mm to global sea level rise. Scientists attribute this to increased ice loss driven by rising atmospheric temperatures and faster ice flow into the ocean, both linked to climate change.
“We are confident that crevasses opening are related to the speed-up of the ice sheet. We’ve known for a number of years now that the ice sheet’s been accelerating quite significantly since 1990, and broadly we understand this to be related to ocean warming,” said Chudley.
The study’s lead researcher hopes that the high-resolution mapping techniques used will be integrated into future studies to improve sea level rise projections. Understanding these fractures is critical for predicting the stability of the ice sheet and its impact on global coastlines.
“Several of our large-scale models struggle to account for a lot of what we call dynamic instabilities,” he said. “These are things related to the glacier moving and getting faster … dynamic instabilities are causing potentially up to a metre of sea level rise by 2100, and 10 metres of sea level rise by 2300.
“So, we desperately need to be better able to project sea level rise, because we need to be able to plan, to mitigate and adapt to sea level rise over the next three centuries.”
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