New Study: Greenland’s Warming, Ice Loss Due To Geothermal Heat

A few years ago, ten glaciologists publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience asserted that “large parts of the north-central Greenland ice sheet are melting from below” due to high geothermal heat flux forcing (Rogozhina et al., 2016).

In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, four more glaciologists (Rysgaardet al., 2018) report that “hot vents” (or hot springs) of geothermally-heated water underneath the Greenland ice sheet can explain localized rising temperatures and glacial melting.

Water Temperatures Beneath Greenland Reach 55-62°C (131-143.6°F), Just Over Halfway To Boiling

Water temperatures of these natural hot springs reach into the 60°C (140°F) range, and there are “several thousands“ of them “all over Greenland“, with observations of high geothermal heat/ice-melt locations spanning the East, West, North, South, and Central regions of this glaciated island.

It’s instructive to put these subsurface hot spring water temperatures (reaching a sweltering 55-62 °C) into perspective.

Greenland’s surface air temperature averages about -28 °C year-round, and the coastal water temperatures routinely hover around 0.0 °C (32.0 °F) during the summer.

Consider that over the last 50 years the global oceans are alleged to have warmed by “only about 0.1°C” in total (Bereiter et al., 2018).  That’s a change of one-tenth of one degree Celsius over 5 decades that climate scientists sympathetic to the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) cause claim could be heavily responsible for the change in Greenland’s glaciated landscape.

Compare this tiny 50-year accumulation of thermal change to the range of variations in the natural, halfway-to-boiling heat source directly beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Interestingly, the role of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in Greenland’s glacier dynamics is not mentioned in the paper.

The Greenland Ice Sheet Has Not Been Complying With The AGW Narrative

Consider these recently-determined scientific conclusions pertaining to the Greenland Ice Sheet.

(a)  Greenland was 3 to 5 °C warmer with 40 kilometers less ice area 4,000-10,000 years ago (Mangerud and Svendsen, 2017, Lasher et al., 2017, Kobashi et al., 2017).

(b) There has been no net warming of the Greenland Ice Sheet in the last 80 years (Hanna et al., 2011;  Zhao et al., 2016).

(c) Melted ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet has contributed only 1.5 centimeters (0.6 of an inch) to global sea level rise since 1900 (Fettweis et al., 2017), with no (zero) net sea level rise contribution between the 1940s and the early 2000s.

(d) Melted ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet contributed only 0.39 of a centimeter (0.15 of an inch) to global sea levels between 1993 and 2010(Leeson et al, 2017).

(e) “[T]he interior of the GrIS [Greenland Ice Sheet] is flowing 95% slower now than it was on average during the Holocene.”  (MacGregor et al., 2016)

(f) Greenland has been cooling slightly since 2005 (Kobashi et al., 2017).

(g) And now it has been determined that the regional locations where warming and ice-melt have occurred on the Greenland Ice Sheet can be primarily attributed to high geothermal heat flux forcing.

The scientific evidence continues to accumulate supporting the position that the Greenland Ice Sheet has not been following the modeled expectations of the anthropogenic global warming narrative.

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