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|a Greenland ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise buffered by meltwater storage in firn |h [electronic resource] |y English. |
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|a [S.l.] : |b Macmillan Publishers Limited, |c 2012-11-08. |
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|a Nature Magazine Volume 491 |y English. |
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|a Please contact the owning institution for licensing and permissions. It is the user's responsibility to ensure use does not violate any third party rights. |
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|a Surface melt on the Greenland ice sheet has shown increasing
trends in areal extent and duration since the beginning of the
satellite era1–3. Records for melt were broken in 20054, 20075,
20106 and 20127. Much of the increased surface melt is occurring
in the percolation zone, a region of the accumulation area that is
perennially covered by snow and firn (partly compacted snow). The
fate of melt water in the percolation zone is poorly constrained:
some may travel away from its point of origin and eventually influence
the ice sheet’s flow dynamics and mass balance and the global
sea level, whereas some may simply infiltrate into cold snow or
firn and refreeze with none of these effects. Here we quantify the
existing water storage capacity of the percolation zone of the
Greenland ice sheet and show the potential for hundreds of
gigatonnes of meltwater storage. We collected in situ observations
of firn structure and meltwater retention along a roughly
85-kilometre-long transect of the melting accumulation area. Our
data show that repeated infiltration events in which melt water
penetrates deeply(more than 10 metres) eventually fill all pore space
with water. As future surface melt intensifies under Arctic warming,
a fraction of melt water that would otherwise contribute to sea-level
rise will fill existing pore space of the percolation zone. We estimate
the lower and upper bounds of this storage sink to be
322644 gigatonnes and 1,289z388
{252 gigatonnes, respectively. Furthermore,
we find that decades are required to fill this pore space under
a range of plausible future climate conditions. Hence, routing of
surface melt water into filling the pore space of the firn column will
delay expansion of the area contributing to sea-level rise, although
once the pore space is filled it cannot quickly be regenerated. |
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|a Electronic reproduction. |c Florida International University, |d 2015. |f (dpSobek) |n Mode of access: World Wide Web. |n System requirements: Internet connectivity; Web browser software. |
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|t Greenland ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise buffered by meltwater storage in firn |
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|a dpSobek |c Sea Level Rise |
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|u http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dpService/dpPurlService/purl/FI15061939/00001 |y Click here for full text |
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|3 Host material |u http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7423/full/nature11566.html |y Greenland ice-sheet contribution to sea-level rise buffered by meltwater storage in firn |
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|a http://dpanther.fiu.edu/sobek/content/FI/15/06/19/39/00001/FI15061939thm.jpg |
