Distant history of the North Atlantic region contributes to the present-day ice loss

From the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences

To understand Greenland’s ice of today researchers have to go far back into Earth’s history. The island’s lithosphere has hot depths which originate in its distant geological past and cause Greenland’s ice to rapidly flow and melt from below. An anomaly zone crosses Greenland from west to east where present-day flow of heat from the Earth’s interior is elevated. With this anomaly, an international team of geoscientists led by Irina Rogozhina and Alexey Petrunin from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences could explain observations from radar and ice core drilling data that indicate a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and increased sliding at the base of the ice that drives the rapid ice flow over a distance of 750 kilometres from the summit area of the Greenland ice…