Saturday, February 7, 2015

Accelerated Ice Melt Causing Iceland to Rise

GPS measurements show that land in the central and southern parts of Iceland have been rising at a faster pace every year, beginning at about the same time as the onset of the ever-increasing melt of the island’s eponymous ice due to rising temperatures, a new study finds.
“There have been a lot of studies that have shown that the uplift in Iceland is primarily due to ice loss,” study lead author Kathleen Compton, a PhD student at the University of Arizona, said. But this one, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is the first to show that the acceleration of one speeds up the other.
That uplift could in turn affect Iceland’s notorious volcanoes and hasten eruptions, which can have impacts on air travel, so clearly seen in the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, which disrupted air traffic for weeks.

Enlarge

No comments:

Post a Comment