Through the use of radar, scientists have recently discovered enormous ice structures underneath the ice sheet of northern Greenland, providing hints about the behavior of a melting ice sheet.
These constructions beneath the ice sheet, some of which are as tall as skyscrapers, are formed when the ice at the foundation of the glacier melts and then refreezes over hundreds of years. This process of the glacier melting under its own weight, and refreezing seems to be accelerating the movement of the glacier towards to sea and warming the ice sheet in general, as reported by Blue and Green Tomorrow.
The study of these formations provides a lot of information about how ice sheets and glaciers will morph as they are affected by climate change. Still, geophysicist Kirsty Tinto, who works at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, believes there is more to be learned.
“If we want to understand how ice is going to respond to climate change, we have to understand its fundamental dynamic,” she said, according to The Guardian. “It is not just that you are melting the surface and the surface is just running into the sea. There is a complicated and quite beautiful system running through the ice and you have to understand it top to bottom to understand what it is doing.”
The insights gained from these formations and the first images of them were published this past Sunday in an issue of Nature Geoscience.