Climate Change Accelerating Ice Loss From Peripheral Glaciers

Greenland’s peripheral glaciers make up only four per cent of the island’s ice cover, but are contributing up to 11 percent of total ice loss from territory, say researchers of a paper published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“You have this pretty small fraction of the ice cover responsible for a relatively large fraction of the ice loss, which is pretty phenomenal,” William Colgan, a researcher at the Department of Glaciology and Climate, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and one of the paper’s authors, said in a interview with Eye on the Arctic.

Peripheral glaciers refer to the glaciers that are separate from the Greenland ice sheet, each with their own snowfall and melting areas. There is approximately 20,300 of them in Greenland but they receive relatively little attention, Colgan said.

“Thousands of little peripheral glaciers are waking up and responding to climate change more quickly and more sensitively than the big ice sheet and turning into a net mass loss state faster than the big ice sheet,” Colgan said.