"Daily tides stoked with increasingly warmer water ate a hole taller than the Washington Monument at the bottom of one of Greenland’s major glaciers in the last couple years, accelerating the retreat of a crucial part of the glacier, a new study found.

And scientists worry that the phenomenon isn’t limited to this one glacier, raising questions about previous projections of melting rates on the world’s vulnerable ice sheets.

The rapid melt seen in this study was in the far northwest of Greenland on Petermann Glacier. If it is happening in the rest of Greenland and the even bigger Antarctic ice sheet, then global ice loss and the sea level rise could jump as much as twice as fast as previously thought, according to the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s bad news,” said study author Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at University of California Irvine. “We know the current projections are too conservative. We know that they have a really hard time matching the current record" of melt."

Seth Borenstein reports for the Associated Press May 8, 2023. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"The Speed Of This Greenland Glacier’s Melt Could Signal Even Worse Sea Level Rise" (Washington Post) [3]