Eric Rignot
Eric Rignot
Eric Rignot is Professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory...
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The behavior of the glaciers that dump ice into the sea is the most important aspect of understanding how an ice sheet will evolve in a changing climate. It takes a long time to build and melt an ice sheet, but glaciers can react quickly to temperature changes.
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It takes a long time to build and melt an ice sheet, but glaciers can react quickly to temperature changes.
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It's likely that Greenland is going to contribute more and faster to rising sea levels than previously estimated.
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This is raising concern on the effects of the polar caps.
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A few years back, we thought ice sheets might grow because of increased precipitation. Now we see that rates of glacier flow are changing. We think the process that is winning overall is the rate of glacier flow.
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The mass loss resulting from this glacier acceleration in Greenland is very significant. These are very active glaciers. They all end up in the ocean, discharge icebergs and are very dynamic. One you push them a little bit out of equilibrium, they start retreating very fast.
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The evolution of the ice sheet, in the context of climate warming, is more rapid than has been predicted by models.
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The Greenland ice sheet's contribution to sea level is an issue of considerable societal and scientific importance.
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These findings call into question predictions of the future of Greenland in a warmer climate from computer models that do not include variations in glacier flow as a component of change. Actual changes will likely be much larger than predicted by these models.