Scientist: Huge Greenland iceberg a sign of warming
Pat Brennan, The Orange County Register
When a massive ice island broke off Greenland last week, it looked quite familiar to UC Irvine climate researcher Eric Rignot.
Rignot, who has attracted global attention for research showing rapid melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in response to global warming, was heading to Greenland from Europe this week for more climate research.
Rignot, also a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, will be taking measurements in fjords by boat to learn how ocean warming might be affecting glaciers.
A few years ago, he conducted research on the 97-square-mile piece of Greenland’s Petermann glacier that broke off Aug. 5 — the largest iceberg to form in the Arctic since 1962, NASA says.
“I know this area pretty well,” Rignot said during a phone interview from Europe, where his was preparing for his research trip. “We had a project in the early 2000s on the part that detached.”
The glacial extension was only about 150 feet thick at its thinnest point, he said.
“This is really thin by floating ice island standards,” he said.
The calving of the ice island, he said, seems to be “a bit out of the norm. It suggests that this ice shelf may be in the process of slow collapse.”
And it is consistent with global warming, he said — especially in the Arctic, where scientists are seeing warming of air and ocean temperatures.
“This is a good illustration of climate change — the ongoing warming of the climate in the Arctic,” he said. “This is not a calving that seems to be part of the natural cycle.”
The precise causes of the calving are complex, he said, and could be a combination of many factors.
“We do expect these sorts of things to happen,” he said. “We can’t quite predict them, and when they happen we can’t exactly pinpoint it to change in ocean temperature, air temperature, sea-ice cover. It may be a mixture of all these processes combined. But at least what we’re seeing is consistent with the warming of the planet.”
His earlier studies of the ice tongue suggested that it had been “quite stable,” he said.
“That glacier is a little bit like a canary in a coal mine,” he said. “In the northern part of Greenland there are a lot of elements that make it sensitive to climate change.”
