Shortly before Jakobshavn Isbræ, a tidewater glacier in Greenland, calves massive chunks of ice into the ocean, there’s a sudden change in the slushy collection of icebergs floating along the glacier’s terminus, according to a new paper led by the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder. The work, published in Nature Geoscience, shows that a relaxation in the thick aggregate of icebergs floating at the glacier-ocean boundary occurs up to an hour before calving events. This finding may help scientists better understand future sea-level rise scenarios and could also help them predict when major episodes of calving are about to occur.
Click here for original story, Slushy iceberg aggregates control calving timing on Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbræ
Source: Phys.org