By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
Jakobshavn is located at the eastern end of the Ilulissat Icefjord (seen here), Greenland
In summer, the Jakobshavn Glacier - widely thought to have
spawned the iceberg that sank the Titanic - is moving about four times
faster than it was in the 1990s.
The Greenland Ice Sheet has seen record melting in recent years and would raise sea levels 6m were it all to vanish.
Details of the research are
published in The Cryosphere journal.
Ian Joughin and Ben Smith of the University of Washington's
Polar Science Center in Seattle analysed pictures from the German
TerraSAR-X satellites to measure the speed of the glacier.
"As the glacier moves we can track changes between images to
produce maps of the ice flow velocity," said Dr Joughin, the study's
lead author.
In the summer of 2012, the glacier reached a record speed of more than 17km per year - more than 46m per day.
"We are now seeing summer speeds more than four times what
they were in the 1990s on a glacier which at that time was believed to
be one of the fastest, if not the fastest, glacier in Greenland," Ian
Joughin explained.
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Greenland Glacier Races to Ocean at Record Speed
Jakobshavn, the glacier widely thought to have spawned the iceberg that sank the Titanic, reaches record speeds.
Chunks of ice litter the ocean in front of Greenland's Jakobshavn glacier.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PAUL SOUDERS
Jane J. Lee
Published February 4, 2014
A Greenland glacier named
Jakobshavn Isbrae, which many believe spawned the iceberg that sank the
Titanic,
has hit record speeds in its race to the ocean. Some may be tempted to
call it the king of the glacier world, but this speedy river of ice is
nothing to crow about.
A
new study published February 3 in the journal
Cryosphere
finds that Jakobshavn's averaged annual speed in 2012 and 2013 was
nearly three times its rate in the 1990s. Its flow rate during the
summer months was even faster.
"We are now seeing summer
speeds more than four times what they were in the 1990s on a glacier
which at that time was believed to be one of the fastest, if not the
fastest, glaciers in Greenland,"
Ian Joughin, a researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle,
told the BBC.
In summer 2012, Jakobshavn reached speeds of about 150 feet (46 meters) per day.
Other
glaciers may periodically flow faster than Jakobshavn, but Greenland's
most well known glacier is the bellwether of climate change in the
region and likely contributes more to sea-level rise than any other
glacier in the Northern Hemisphere—as much as 4 percent of the global
total, Joughin and his colleagues found in an earlier study. (Read about
glacial meltdown in
National Geographic magazine.)
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