China News Service, Beijing, December 6 (Reporter Sun Zifa) A new climate science research paper published in the professional academic journal "Nature-Earth Science" under Springer Nature shows that thousands of years ago, the ice sheet extending to Northeast Greenland The fast-moving ice stream has stagnated and abruptly reconfigured.
The findings may help people understand the stability of the Greenland ice sheet under future climate scenarios.
Ice accumulated from snowfall in Greenland's interior generally moves toward the coast, some of it through fast-moving channels called ice streams, the paper said.
Both ice flow and direct surface melting are a major way in which ice sheets lose mass.
The Northeast Greenland Ice Stream is a prime example of the loss of a large portion of ice mass from the current Greenland Ice Sheet.
While ice flow is important for understanding the overall behavior of this and other ice sheets, it has been unclear why ice flow occurs and how stable it is over time.
Steven Franke, first author and corresponding author of the paper, Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and colleagues and collaborators used radar data to analyze the ice buried deep under the northeast Greenland ice sheet, This was then used to reconstruct past ice flow patterns in the region.
They found a series of prominent folds that suggested the ice was flowing rapidly north of the current Northeast Greenland Ice Stream.
Judging from the orientation of these folds and the way they deform, at least two now-inactive streams of ice once existed.
While it is difficult to date these features, the authors suggest that these ice streams were active until at least the early Holocene (about 11,500 years ago), and that their source came from farther north than modern ice streams.
The authors concluded that the exact reasons for the shift in ice flow position are still unclear, but that the Greenland ice flow can quickly adjust to changes in glacier conditions, and that continued warming could lead to similar reconfigurations in the future, with potential implications for sea level rise .
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