It has thinned by more than 50 metres since 2012 – about one sixth of its original thickness – and the ice flow is now 25 times faster, accelerating to speeds of several kilometres per year.
Over the last two decades, thinning of the Austfonna ice cap in the Svalbard archipelago − , roughly half way between Norway and the North Pole − has spread more than 50km inland, to within 10km of the summit. .
A team led by the scientists from the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling (CPOM) at the University of Leeds combined observations from eight satellite missions, including Sentinel-1A and CryoSat, with results from regional climate models, to understand what was happening.
Sea level rise
The study’s lead author, geophysicist Dr Mal McMillan, a member of the CPOM team, said: “These results provide a clear example of just how quickly ice caps can evolve, and highlight the challenges associated with making projections of their future contribution to sea level rise.”
The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, is the first to make use of measurements from the European Space Agency’s latest Earth observation satellite, Sentinel-1A.
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“Glacier surges, similar to what we have observed, are a well-known phenomenon”, said Professor Andrew Shepherd, the director of CPOM. “What we see here is unusual because it has developed over such a long period of time, and appears to have started when ice began to thin and accelerate at the coast.”
Read more at Arctic Glacier’s Galloping Melt Baffles Scientists
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