Now, a new study is revealing just how little we understand this northern behemoth.

Led by geophysicist Beata Csatho, University at Buffalo associate professor of geology, the research provides what the authors think is the first comprehensive picture of how Greenland’s ice is vanishing. It suggests that current ice sheet modeling studies are too simplistic to accurately predict future sea level rise, and that Greenland may lose ice more rapidly in the near future than previously thought.

Beata Csatho, associate professor, Department of Geology.University at Buffalo“The great importance of our data is that for the first time, we have a comprehensive picture of how all of Greenland’s glaciers have changed over the past decade,” Csatho says.

“This information is crucial for developing and validating numerical models that predict how the ice sheet may change and contribute to global sea level over the next few hundred years,” says Cornelis J. van der Veen, professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kansas, who played a key role in interpreting glaciological changes.

The project was a massive undertaking, using satellite and aerial data from NASA’s ICESat spacecraft and Operation IceBridge field campaign to reconstruct how the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet changed at nearly 100,000 locations from 1993 to 2012.

Ice loss takes place in a complex manner, with the ice sheet both melting and calving ice into the ocean.

The study had two major findings:

• Scientists were able to provide new estimates of annual ice loss at high spatial resolution (see below).
• The research revealed that current models fail to accurately capture how the entire Greenland Ice Sheet is changing and contributing to rising oceans.

The second point is crucial to climate change modelers.

Today’s simulations use the activity of four well-studied glaciers — Jakobshavn, Helheim, Kangerlussuaq and Petermann — to forecast how the entire ice sheet will dump ice into the oceans.

But the new research shows activity at these four locations may not be representative of what is happening with glaciers across the ice sheet. In fact, glaciers undergo patterns of thinning and thickening that current climate change simulations fail to address, Csatho says.

“There are 242 outlet glaciers wider than 1.5 km on the Greenland Ice Sheet, and what we see is that their behavior is complex in space and time,” she says. “The local climate and geological conditions, the local hydrology — all of these factors have an effect. The current models do not address this complexity.”

The team identified areas of rapid shrinkage in southeast Greenland that today’s models don’t acknowledge. This leads Csatho to believe the ice sheet could lose ice faster in the future than today’s simulations would suggest.

The results were published on Dec. 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

To analyze how the height of the ice sheet was changing, Csatho and UB research professor and photogrammetrist Anton Schenk developed a computational technique called Surface Elevation Reconstruction And Change detection to fuse together data from NASA satellite and aerial missions.

The analysis found the Greenland Ice Sheet lost about 243 metric gigatons of ice annually — equivalent to about 277 cubic kilometers of ice per year — from 2003-09, the period for which the team had the most comprehensive data. This loss is estimated to have added about 0.68 millimeters of water to the oceans annually.

The figures are averages, and ice loss varied from year to year and from region to region. 

Glaciers don’t just gradually lose mass when the temperature rises. That’s one reason it’s difficult to predict their response to global warming.

In the study, scientists found that some of Greenland’s glaciers thickened even when the temperature rose. Others exhibited accelerated thinning. Some displayed both thinning and thickening, with sudden reversals.

As a step toward building better models of sea level rise, the research team divided Greenland’s 242 glaciers into seven major groups based on their behavior from 2003-09.

“Understanding the groupings will help us pick out examples of glaciers that are representative of the whole,” Csatho says. “We can then use data from these representative glaciers in models to provide a more complete picture of what is happening.”

In a new project, she and colleagues are investigating why different glaciers respond differently to warming. Factors could include the temperature of the surrounding ocean, the level of friction between a glacier and the bedrock below, the amount of water under a glacier and the geometry of the fjord.

“The physics of these processes are not well understood,” Csatho says.

The project included contributions by researchers at UB, University of Kansas, Utrecht University in The Netherlands, the Technical University of Denmark and Florida Atlantic University.

 The NASA missions: A colossal undertaking