The Jakobshavn glacier around 2012 was retreating about three kilometres and thinning nearly 40 metres annually. But it started growing again at about the same rate in the past two years, according to a study in Monday's Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary.
"That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system," said Jason Box, an ice and climate scientist with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. "The good news is that it's a reminder that it's not necessarily going that fast. But it is going."
Box, who wasn't part of the study, said Jakobshavn is "arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the Northern Hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king."
A natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters likely caused the glacier to reverse course, said study lead author Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project. Khazendar and colleagues say this coincides with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation — a natural and temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean that is like a distant cousin to El Niño in the Pacific.
Temperatures near the face of the glacier are now the coldest they've been in 40 years.
I'm enjoying these scientists struggling with this information, which does not support the narrative that helps them get funding. Instead of considering all possible options, they leap head first into the first rationalization that will allow them to continue with their Chicken Little 'the sky is falling' hysteria, and the sweet, sweet dollars that hysteria draws to their greasy pockets.
They'll be the first ones we feed to the returning Ice Age megafauna.
Whenever the funding is directed toward a specific result that the funder wants to see, the results are useless. However it has been used to great effect on the gullible.
ReplyDeleteWho was it that wrote that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it?
ReplyDeleteA "real" scientist might be encouraged to re-examine his priors and premises. ...I wish the great Richard Feynman were still around....
ReplyDeleteThere is some evidence out there that when the Glaciers started moving, it wasn't slow, like we see today. Ice-age glaciers move fast. For glaciers.
ReplyDeleteAs to climatologists enamored in 'global warming,' they need to talk to the archeologists who have enjoyed the last 40 years or so of retreating glaciers as they expose settlements, caves, bodies and other signs of human life that got covered up by all the ice. Hmmmmm, makes you wonder, doesn't it?