In further news of Arctic climate awfulness, meltwater under the Greenland Ice Sheet is draining so much and so fast that it could power a “massive” hydroelectric power station. Yay?

We’ve established that climate change is real and Earth is warming. Greenland’s ancient ice is melting. In fact, it now rains at the highest point in Greenland, and the meltwater itself is adding a millimeter of water to the sea level every year. Just the meltwater from Greenland is doing that. Folks, this is not good.

So Poul Christoffersen and his team installed a radio-echo-sounding instrument about 30 kilometers inland at Store Glacier and then drilled a borehole next to the instrument. With the data they collected from both the instrument and the borehole itself, they were able to track the water that is underneath the ice sheet and understand how it interacts with the ice. The results were also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The average melt rate was 14 millimeters per day with one extreme event that happened during a rainfall, which led to 57 millimeters of melt. Per Christoffersen: 82 million cubic meters of water were delivered to the base of this glacier in a single day.

Back to that hydroelectric power station comment. All that energy produced actually adds to the melt rate. Rather than just forming small channels as the water flows, the water spread out and heated a larger area of the subsurface ice. And it’s a snowball type of process that gets bigger and bigger in a feedback loop – more flowing water means higher temperatures means more melt and so on. As Christofferses notes: It’s a super-powerful mechanism that’s going to alter the thermal state of the interior of the ice sheet as we get meltwater at higher and higher elevations.

Keep in mind that this research was done using a single radar instrument and is only applicable to Greenland and its subglacial drainage regions, not the ice sheet as a whole. That doesn’t make the news better, but it does keep it in perspective. More work is needed to understand how the meltwater affects the entirety of the ice sheet. Perhaps an array of these sensors? We will, of course, bring you updates on all things climate change here on Daily Space.

More Information

It’s Getting Hot Under Greenland (Eos)

“Rapid basal melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet from surface meltwater drainage,” Tun Jan Young et al., 2022 February 22, PNAS