Understanding The Greenland Ice Sheet's Meltwater Channels

Ice sheets were never simple. There is no magic knob that could be turned to optimize melting rates and movement, outside environmental press releases. A new paper in Nature this week shows that not only is meltwater not as simple as sometimes contended, we don't even know what we don't know. Observations of moulins (vertical conduits connecting water on top of the glacier down to the bed of the ice sheet) and boreholes in Greenland show that subglacial channels ameliorate the speedup caused by water delivery to the base of the ice sheet in the short term. read more

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