In the last two years, the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland has started growing again at about the same rate it was shrinking in 2012, according to a study by NASA.
Watch as scientists try to make sense of the fact that reality doesn’t agree with their models, so reality must be wrong.
This from Science News:
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.
And neither they nor their models can explain why.