A recent study conducted by NASA has found that a Greenland melting glacier which has been melting over the past so many years, has now started miraculously growing. The Jakobshavn glacier was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet annually since 2012. However, in the past couple of year, the glacier started growing at the same rate, and experts believe that this is just a temporary phenomenon.
The research report published in the journal Nature Geoscience revealed that the natural cyclical cooling of North Atlantic waters has caused the regrowing of Jakobshavn glacier.
Ala Khazendar, a NASA glaciologist on the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project, and the study's lead author said that this natural cyclical cooling has coincided with a flip of the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is actually temporary cooling and warming of parts of the ocean, a phenomenon very similar to the El Nino in the Pacific.
"That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system. The good news is that it's a reminder that it's not necessarily going that fast. But it is going. Jakobshavn Glacier is arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king," said climate scientist Jason Box, who was not a part of this study, New York Post reports.
Josh Willis, the study's co-author revealed that this regrowth of the glacier is just a piece of temporary happy news. As per Willis, this is actually bad news in the long run as it tells experts that ocean temperature is a pivotal player in glacier retreats and advances than previously thought.
A few days back, NASA had warned that a gigantic iceberg, twice the size of New York City may soon break off from an ice shelf in Antarctica. Even though researchers revealed that it is pretty difficult to predict the exact time of break off, experts made it clear that they are monitoring the ice shelf to know more about the way in which the iceberg is going to break off from the shelf.
