I’ve recently co-authored an accessible review of recent research into iceberg calving. You can read it by clicking here.
Approximately half of the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet occurs where glaciers flow directly into the ocean. At the ice/ocean interface, glacier ice is lost through fracturing (i.e., iceberg calving) and melting in contact with the relatively warm ocean. The rates of this ice loss has increased in recent years, which has drawn significant attention within the glaciological community to the calving and submarine melting processes. However, there is much that we still need to understand about calving before we can reliably predict how rapidly glacier might calve in the future.
For a newsletter targeted at a broad audience, Jeremy Bassis and I have summarized the existing research on iceberg calving, and some of the ways in which we can improve on our understanding of calving. The other articles within this newsletter summarize other perspectives on the relationship between the Greenland Ice Sheet and its surrounding oceans. The full newsletter, from which I’ve excerpted our piece on calving, is available here.