Transcript:
Greenland is covered by more than 650,000 square miles of ice – a massive, frozen ice sheet that blankets the island and slowly flows toward the ocean.
But as the climate warms, the ice is melting and flowing into the ocean more rapidly – causing more cracks, or crevasses, to form in the ice sheet as it’s stretched and pulled apart.
Some of these crevasses are huge.
Chudley: “They can be tens or even 100 meters wide. That’s big enough to fly a helicopter through.”
Thomas Chudley is a glaciologist at Durham University in the U.K.
In a new study, he and his colleagues found that between 2016 and 2021, Greenland’s ice sheet gained more than 900 million cubic meters of crevasses.
That has dangerous implications.
When a crevasse forms, that can cause the ice sheet’s flow to speed up. That results in even more crevasses, triggering a feedback loop where the ice sheet breaks apart faster and faster.
And as more ice melts into the ocean, sea levels will rise – increasing the risk of flooding in coastal cities.
Chudley: “So what happens to the ice sheets over the next 300 years will affect millions of people living around the globe.”
Reporting credit: Ethan Freedman / ChavoBart Digital Media
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