Atlantic Water warming increases melt below Northeast Greenland's last floating ice tongue.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38378701.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-45650-z and PMC identifier 10879102.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The 79 North Glacier (79NG) features Greenland's largest floating ice tongue. Even though its extent has not changed significantly in recent years, observations have indicated a major thinning of the ice tongue from below. Both ocean warming and an increase in subglacial discharge from the ice sheet induced by atmospheric warming could increase the basal melt; however, available observations alone cannot tell which of these is the main driver. Here, we employ a global simulation which explicitly resolves the ocean circulation in the cavity with 700 m resolution to disentangle the impact of the ocean and atmosphere. We find that the interannual variability of basal melt below 79NG over the past 50 years is mainly associated with changes in the temperature of the Atlantic Intermediate Water inflow, which can be traced back across the Northeast Greenland continental shelf to the eastern Fram Strait with a lag of 3 years.