The breaking off of large chunks of ice from glaciers accelerates the melting of the Arctic ice sheet in Greenland. This has been measured for the first time by an international research team using fibre-optic technology, which is also used to study Swiss glaciers. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an increasingly rapid pace. Since 2002, it has lost an average of around 270 billion tonnes of ice per year, causing a sea-level rise of nearly two centimetres. The calving of large ice blocks is one of the most visible effects of ice-sheet mass loss caused by climate change. But it’s also a phenomenon that itself further intensifies melting: when an iceberg collapses into the sea, it brings warmer water to the surface, which in turn accelerates the melting process. This is the discovery made by an international research team led by the universities of Zurich and Washington, which for the first time measured how ice break-up speeds up the retreat of Greenland’s Arctic ice sheet. The ...
