Nearly a decade ago, global news outlets reported vast ice melt in the Arctic as sapphire lakes glimmered across the previously frozen Greenland Ice Sheet, one of the most important contributors to sea-level rise. Now researchers have revealed the long-term impact of that extreme melt.
Using a new approach to ice-penetrating radar data, Stanford University scientists show that this melting left behind a contiguous layer of refrozen ice inside the snowpack, including near the middle of the ice sheet where surface melting is usually minimal.
Most importantly, the formation of the melt layer changed the ice sheet’s behavior by reducing its ability to store future meltwater. The research appears in Nature Communications April 20. [Read more…] about Can extreme melt destabilize ice sheets?
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