While stability far from assured, Greenland perhaps not headed down too slippery a slope

Meltwater carves two troughs, each roughly 20 feet deep, in the Greenland Ice Sheet before disappearing into a moulin, a conduit that carries the meltwater through more than half a... Click here for more information.

Lubricating meltwater that makes its way from the surface down to where a glacier meets bedrock turns out to be only a minor reason why Greenland's outlet glaciers accelerated their race to the sea 50 to 100 percent in the 1990s and early 2000s, according to University of Washington's Ian Joughin and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Sarah Das. The two are lead co-authors of two papers posted this week on Science magazine's Science Express.

The report also shows that surface meltwater is reaching bedrock farther inland under the Greenland Ice Sheet, something scientists had speculated was happening but had little evidence.

"Considered together, the new findings indicate that while surface melt plays a substantial role in ice sheet dynamics, it may not produce large instabilities leading to sea level rise," says Joughin, a glaciologist with the UW's Applied Physics Laboratory. Joughin goes on to stress that "there are still other mechanisms that are contributing to the current ice loss and likely will increase this loss as climate warms."

Outlet glaciers are rapid flows of ice that start in the Greenland Ice Sheet and extend all the way to the ocean, where their fronts break apart in the water as icebergs, a process called calving. While most of the ice sheet moves less than one tenth a mile a year, some outlet glaciers gallop along at 7.5 miles a year, making outlet glaciers a concern because of their more immediate potential to cause sea level rise.

If surface meltwater lubrication at the intersection of ice and bedrock was playing a major role in speeding up the outlet glaciers, one could imagine how global warming, which would create ever more meltwater at the surface, could cause Greenland's ice to shrink much more rapidly than expected – even catastrophically. Glacial ice is second only to the oceans as the largest reservoir of water on the planet and 10 percent of the Earth's glacial ice is found in Greenland.