Eric Rignot is Professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and principal scientist for the Radar Science and Engineering Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory... (wikipedia)
Whether the warming is effected by man is not something that we can directly determine with this study.
We did not look at one or two glaciers. We looked at all of them.
I don't think it will effect Californians immediately, It will effect storms along the coasts and we will see a measurable effect at sea level as a result of melting ice caps.
What we found is this is probably the dominant response of the ice sheets.
Greenland is probably going to contribute more and faster to sea level rise than predicted.
I think this will heighten concerns that maybe the sea-level models are a little too conservative.
What it means right now is that Greenland is producing 20 percent of the sea rise. We think that contribution will increase from generation to generation.
We are witnessing enormous changes, and it will take some time before we understand how it happened, although it is clearly a result of warming around the glaciers.
What surprised us was the magnitude of the changes.
We don't think these are just bursts. We haven't seen any of these glaciers coming back to normal.
The southern half of Greenland is reacting to what we think is climate warming. The northern half is waiting but I don't think it's going to take long.
A few years back, we thought ice sheets might grow because of increased precipitation. Now we see that rates of glacier flow are changing. We think the process that is winning overall is the rate of glacier flow.
This is raising concern on the effects of the polar caps.
It's likely that Greenland is going to contribute more and faster to rising sea levels than previously estimated.
The behavior of the glaciers that dump ice into the sea is the most important aspect of understanding how an ice sheet will evolve in a changing climate. It takes a long time to build and melt an ice sheet, but glaciers can react quickly to temperature changes.
It takes a long time to build and melt an ice sheet, but glaciers can react quickly to temperature changes.
This is clearly a result of warming around the periphery of Greenland.
In the future, as warming around Greenland progresses further north, we expect additional losses from northwest Greenland glaciers, which will then increase Greenland's contribution to sea level rise.
Climate warming can work in different ways, but generally speaking, if you warm up the ice sheet, the glacier will flow faster.
These findings call into question predictions of the future of Greenland in a warmer climate from computer models that do not include variations in glacier flow as a component of change. Actual changes will likely be much larger than predicted by these models.
The evolution of the ice sheet, in the context of climate warming, is more rapid than has been predicted by models.
The Greenland ice sheet's contribution to sea level is an issue of considerable societal and scientific importance.
The mass loss resulting from this glacier acceleration in Greenland is very significant. These are very active glaciers. They all end up in the ocean, discharge icebergs and are very dynamic. One you push them a little bit out of equilibrium, they start retreating very fast.
