Global warming

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Rapidly melting sea ice in Greenland has presented an unusual hazard for research teams retrieving their oceanographic moorings and weather station equipment.

A photo, taken by Steffen Olsen from the Centre for Ocean and Ice at the Danish Meteorological Institute on 13 June, showed sled dogs wading through water ankle-deep on top of a melting ice sheet in the country’s north-west. In the startling image, it seems as though the dogs are walking on water.




The photo, taken in the Inglefield Bredning fjord, depicted water on top of what Olsen said was an ice sheet 1.2 metres thick.
His colleague at the institute, Rasmus Tonboe, tweeted that the “rapid melt and sea ice with low permeability and few cracks leaves the melt water on top”.


Graphic on the early melting of Greenland snows:




More at The Guardian.


Comment: the Greenland ice cap is out of equilibrium with climatic conditions since the Lower Dryas ending about 11500 years b2K*. Were it to disappear, it would not form anew until the conditions typical of the start of an Ice Age, with resulting changes in weather patterns at least as far as the American Great Plains. 


*before the year 2000 AD.