TheRobotLives wrote:
Greenland's main glacier is
growing, and that's bad news ...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envi ... e-growing/When a glacier increases in mass it's bad news, if a glacier melts it's bad news.
That isn't what that article said (Nat Geo's wording is a little bit funky, probably to get people to click on it). This is the essence:
Quote:
This reverses the glacier’s 20-year trend of thinning and retreating.
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despite the fact that this particular glacier is growing, the whole Greenland ice sheet is still losing lots and lots of ice. Jakobshavn drains only about seven percent of the entire ice sheet, so even if it were growing robustly, mass loss from the rest of the ice sheet would outweigh its slight expansion.
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on average the air and sea are warming, and that means retreats are always going to be bigger than advances
The point is outlet glaciers (ice streams) aren't always on 'runaway' retreats. Sometimes some of them will regain some mass, but overall the continental ice sheet is losing more ice than its gaining. (I'm a Glaciology graduate student)