By Sid Perkins
A host of observations from satellites, aircraft, and scientists on the ground suggests that Greenland’s ice sheet diminished this year at a rate more than twice that seen just a few years ago.
By surveying the fringes of Greenland from aircraft equipped with laser altimeters, scientists have for several years noted the thinning of many glaciers (SN: 7/22/00, p. 54: Available to subscribers at Greenland’s ice is thinner at the margins). New assessments suggest that the thinning is accelerating, says William B. Krabill, a glaciologist at NASA’s Wallops Island (Va.) Flight Facility. In western Greenland, the heights of some glaciers are now dropping by 15 meters each year, he said last week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.